Giuseppe Primiero – författare

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Conference on Computability in Europe, CiE 2019, held in Durham, UK, in July 2019.

The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. In addition, this volume includes 7 invited papers. The conference CiE 2018 had the following six special sessions: computational neuroscience, history and philosophy of computing, lowness notions in computability, probabilistic programming and higher-order computation, smoothed and probabilistic analysis of algorithms, and transnite computations.

This book presents a historical and philosophical analysis of programming systems, intended as large computational systems like, for instance, operating systems, programmed to control processes. The introduction to the volume emphasizes the contemporary need of providing a foundational analysis of such systems, rooted in a broader historical and philosophical discussion.

The different chapters are grouped around three major themes. The first concerns the early history of large systems developed against the background of issues related to the growing semantic gap between hardware and code. The second revisits the fundamental issue of complexity of large systems, dealt with by the use of formal methods and the development of `grand designs’ like Unix. Finally, a third part considers several issues related to programming systems in the real world, including chapters on aesthetical, ethical and political issues.

This book will interest researchers from a diversityof backgrounds. It will appeal to historians, philosophers, as well as logicians and computer scientists who want to engage with topics relevant to the history and philosophy of programming and more specifically the role of programming systems in the foundations of computing.

The relation between logic and knowledge has been at the heart of a lively debate since the 1960s. On the one hand, the epistemic approaches based their formal arguments in the mathematics of Brouwer and intuitionistic logic. Following Michael Dummett, they started to call themselves `antirealists''. Others persisted with the formal background of the Frege-Tarski tradition, where Cantorian set theory is linked via model theory to classical logic. Jaakko Hintikka tried to unify both traditions by means of what is now known as `explicit epistemic logic''. Under this view, epistemic contents are introduced into the object language as operators yielding propositions from propositions, rather than as metalogical constraints on the notion of inference.The Realism-Antirealism debate has thus had three players: classical logicians, intuitionists and explicit epistemic logicians. The editors of the present volume believe that in the age of Alternative Logics, where manifold developments in logic happen at a breathtaking pace, this debate should be revisited. Contributors to this volume happily took on this challenge and responded with new approaches to the debate from both the explicit and the implicit epistemic point of view.