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Problems for a Philosophy of Software Engineering

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Abstract

On the basis of an earlier contribution to the philosophy of computer science by Amnon Eden, this essay discusses to what extent Eden’s ‘paradigms’ of computer science can be transferred or applied to software engineering. This discussion implies an analysis of how software engineering and computer science are related to each other. The essay concludes that software engineering can neither be fully subsumed by computer science, nor vice versa. Consequently, also the philosophies of computer science and software engineering—though related to each other—are not identical branches of a general philosophy of science. This also implies that not all of Eden’s earlier arguments can be directly mapped from the domain of computer science into the domain of software science. After the discussion of this main topic, the essay also points to some further problems and open issues for future studies in the philosophy of software science and engineering.

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Notes

  1. One of the anonymous reviewers of the pre-print draft of this article suggested that Eden would have “conjectured” the technocratic paradigm mainly for methodological reasons, so-to-say as an ideal methodological entity without a strong basis in reality. However, Eden has recently confirmed (in private communication) that he still believes that “the technocratic paradigm is not only live and kicking, but it also has all but taken over computer science, at least at the level of funding and other forms of decision making, which singularitly affects the direction that this field is taking” (18 Oct 2010, via eMail).

  2. Anfangsproblem.

  3. Hugo Dingler, Peter Janich, et al. Their methodological constructivism must not be confused with epistemological constructivism (truth as social construct) and also not with Brouwer’s mathematical constructivism, a.k.a. intuitionism (in which, amongst others, the classical tertium-non-datur axiom, \(\neg\neg A\equiv A\), is not accepted).

  4. Welt.

  5. Zeug.

  6. Unless, of course, we would be willing to amputate the semantics of ‘explanation’ deliberately and ad-hoc to such a crippled extent that it becomes, by decree, equivalent to the semantics of ‘comprehensive description’.

  7. Grundlagenstreit.

  8. About the philosophy of computer science at least two special editions have already appeared in print: one in this journal, Minds and Machines (Springer-Verlag 2007), and another one in the Journal of Applied Logic (Elsevier 2008), see http://pcs.essex.ac.uk/. There are also textbooks such as Floridi (1999) and Colburn (2000).

  9. The same argument even holds for computer hardware design which is becoming increasingly dependent on software-based modelling tools.

  10. I have heard about such a software-epistemological position in a lecture presented by Manfred Nagl in the late 1990s.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the students of my software engineering seminars at the University of Pretoria for some interesting discussions in the context of this essay. Thanks also to Tom Maibaum for some inspiring conversations during the ICFEM International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, 2008. Several fruitful discussions with my colleagues Derrick Kourie and Morkel Theunissen are gratefully acknowledged, too. Last but not least many thanks to the editors of this journal, to the guest-editors of this special issue, as well as to their anonymous reviewers, for the helpful comments which they have provided on the pre-print drafts of this essay.

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  1. Research Group for Software Science and Formal Methods, Department of Computer Science, Universiteit van Pretoria, 0002, Pretoria, Republic of South Africa

    Stefan Gruner

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Correspondence to Stefan Gruner.

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This essay is written in commemoration of the 100th birthdays of Konrad Zuse and Lothar Collatz (both *1910) during the year 2010. Zuse contributed to the science of computing coming from the domain of engineering, Collatz from the domain of mathematics.

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Gruner, S. Problems for a Philosophy of Software Engineering. Minds & Machines 21, 275–299 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-011-9234-2

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