This paper argues that the difference between contemporary software intensive scientific practice and more traditional non-software intensive varieties results from the characteristically high conditionality of software. We explain why the path complexity of programs with high conditionality imposes limits on standard error correction techniques and why this matters. While it is possible, in general, to characterize the error distribution in inquiry that does not involve high conditionality, we cannot characterize the error distribution in inquiry that depends on software. Software intensive (...) science presents distinctive error and uncertainty modalities that pose new challenges for the epistemology of science. (shrink)

How can we be certain that software is reliable? Is there any method that can verify the correctness of software for all cases of interest? Computer scientists and software engineers have informally assumed that there is no fully general solution to the verification problem. In this paper, we survey approaches to the problem of software verification and offer a new proof for why there can be no general solution.

How can we be certain that software is reliable? Is there any method that can verify the correctness of software for all cases of interest? Computer scientists and software engineers have informally assumed that there is no fully general solution to the verification problem. In this paper, we survey approaches to the problem of software verification and offer a new proof for why there can be no general solution.

Software-intensive systems are ubiquitous in the industrialized world. The reliability of software has implications for how we understand scientific knowledge produced using software-intensive systems and for our understanding of the ethical and political status of technology. The reliability of a software system is largely determined by the distribution of errors and by the consequences of those errors in the usage of that system. We select a taxonomy of software error types from the literature on empirically observed software errors and compare (...) that taxonomy to Giuseppe Primiero’s Minds and Machines 24: 249–273, (2014) taxonomy of error in information systems. Because Primiero’s taxonomy is articulated in terms of a coherent, explicit model of computation and is more fine-grained than the empirical taxonomy we select, we might expect Primiero’s taxonomy to provide insights into how to reduce the frequency of software error better than the empirical taxonomy. Whether using one software error taxonomy can help to reduce the frequency of software errors better than another taxonomy is ultimately an empirical question. (shrink)

This paper provides a reply to articles by Nicola Angius and Guiseppe Primiero responding to our paper “Software Intensive Science”.

There are many tangled normative and technical questions involved in evaluating the quality of software used in epidemiological simulations. In this paper we answer some of these questions and offer practical guidance to practitioners, funders, scientific journals, and consumers of epidemiological research. The heart of our paper is a case study of the Imperial College London covid-19 simulator, set in the context of recent work in epistemology of simulation and philosophy of epidemiology.

The comments accompanying Proposition (Prop.) 11 (“God... necessarily exists”) in Part I of Spinoza’s The Ethics contain sketches of what appear to be at least three more or less distinct ontological arguments. The first of these is problematic even on its own terms. More is true: even the proposition “God exists” (GE), a consequence of Prop. 11, cannot be derived from the definitions and axioms of Part I (the “DAPI”) of The Ethics; thus, Prop. 11 cannot be derived from the (...) DAPI, either. To prove these claims, I use an automated deduction system (ADS) to show that Prop. 11 is independent of the DAPI. I then augment the DAPI with some auxiliary assumptions I believe Spinoza would accept and that sustain an automated derivation of (GE). The results illustrate how an ADS can facilitate the analysis of arguments and yield an apparently novel argument cast in the style of Spinoza. (shrink)

Quantum computing is of high interest because it promises to perform at least some kinds of computations much faster than classical computers. Arute et al. 2019 (informally, “the Google Quantum Team”) report the results of experiments that purport to demonstrate “quantum supremacy” – the claim that the performance of some quantum computers is better than that of classical computers on some problems. Do these results close the debate over quantum supremacy? We argue that they do not. In the following, we (...) provide an overview of the Google Quantum Team’s experiments, then identify some open questions in the quest to demonstrate quantum supremacy. (shrink)