The purpose of the Society for Machines and Mentality is to advance philosophical understanding of issues involving artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science.
The purpose of the Society for Machines and Mentality is to advance philosophical understanding of issues involving artificial intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science.
The 2006 Annual Meeting will be held on Thursday, December 28, 2006, from 5:15 to 7:15 pm in Washington, DC, USA.
The meeting is held in conjunction with the 2006 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The location is the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Our meeting is Group Session GV-7 and will convene in Virginia Suite A (Lobby Level).
The topic for the 2006 meeting is The Ontology of Software. Three papers will be presented.
Problems in Software Ontology
(University of Essex)
Abstract: What ontological category do computer programs belong to? What are the ontological commitments of a program? Of a programming language? We discuss these questions in the context of related methodological and epistemological questions in the philosophy of computer science. We examine the answers offered by various computer scientists to these questions and their commitments (if any) to schools in traditional philosophy. In particular we investigate the justification for the naturalist position in the ontology and epistemology of software.
The slides for this talk are available as a PDF file: “Problems in Software Ontology”.
Software and Other Cultural Artifacts
(University at Buffalo and Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science, Saarbrücken, Germany)
Abstract: The ontology of cultural artifacts ranges in its focus from flint tools (classified in museum ontologies) to works of literature (classified in library ontologies). Pieces of software fall somewhere between these two extremes. On the one hand they are tools, built to achieve a specific purpose. On the other hand they are textual artifacts, with syntactic and representational properties; they have authors, and even readers; like dramatic textual artifacts they can be realized (in performances or executions). We shall propose an ontology of software drawing all of these aspects together.
The Existence of Software
(William Paterson University)
Abstract: Many ontologies posit levels of existence. A whole exists at a level above its parts; a set exists at a level above its members. Hardware objects are at the lowest level in a computational ontology. Software objects exist at higher levels. We use the game of life to illustrate a stratified computational ontology. The cells in the life grid are the hardware objects. An event is a function from cells to values 0 or 1. A process is a series of events. A process contains a software object iff its content is generated by some rule that is independent of the rule for cells. We give a precise existence axiom for software objects. As expected, blinkers, gliders, puffer trains, and so on are software objects. Software objects satisfy traditional conceptions of materiality. Our conception of software objects has intriguing links to modern conceptions of material particles in terms of symmetry groups and topological invariants. Software objects are not abstract.
The full paper is available as a PDF file: “The Existence of Software”.
The meeting will be chaired by Jack Copeland (University of Canterbury–New Zealand). He will deliver “Comments from the Chair: Reflections on an Ontology of Software”.
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