Question Since programming languages are supposed to be ways to express logical processes, it would seem that they would be of interest to philosophers on some level or another. For example, it would seem there are interesting relationships to be described between object-oriented programming and Plato's theory of ideas. So what are the relationships between programming on the one hand and philosophy on the other? What investigations into this area have been conducted?

Accepted:
June 16, 2011

Comments

I'm not sure about the relationship to Plato's theory of ideas, but there are many connections between programming and philosophy. I'll mention just a few.

Some of the earliest investigations into natural language semantics appealed to ideas connected to the notion of compilation. Roughly, the thought was that understanding an uttered sentence might be something like compiling a program, i.e., translating it into the "machine language" of the brain. My own view, which is probably the majority view, is that this is seriously confused, but it has been attractive to many people.

The idea that "the mind is the software of the brain" has also been very attractive, since it was first articulated (though not quite in those terms) by the great British logician Alan Turing. There are many ways to implement this idea, perhaps the most familiar of them being the various forms of functionalism.

Finally, philosophers are often interested in formal languages, and software languages are certainly a variety of such languages. They are different from the usual languages we consider, because they tend to contain not assertions but rather instructions, so they are more "imperative" than "declarative". But I think they would nonetheless repay attention from philosophers of language.