Topics in Programming Languages, a Philosophical Analysis through the case of Prolog

[EN]Programming languages seldom find proper anchorage in philosophy of logic, language and science. is more, philosophy of language seems to be restricted to natural languages and linguistics, and even philosophy of logic is rarely framed into programming languages topics. The logic programming paradigm and Prolog are, thus, the most adequate paradigm and programming language to work on this subject, combining natural language processing and linguistics, logic programming and constriction methodology on both algorithms and procedures, on an overall philosophizing declarative status. Not only this, but the dimension of the Fifth Generation Computer system related to strong Al wherein Prolog took a major role. and its historical frame in the very crucial dialectic between procedural and declarative paradigms, structuralist and empiricist biases, serves, in exemplar form, to treat straight ahead philosophy of logic, language and science in the contemporaneous age as well. In recounting Prolog's philosophical, mechanical and algorithmic harbingers, the opportunity is open to various routes. We herein shall exemplify some: - the mechanical-computational background explored by Pascal, Leibniz, Boole, Jacquard, Babbage, Konrad Zuse, until reaching to the ACE (Alan Turing) and EDVAC (von Neumann), offering the backbone in computer architecture, and the work of Turing, Church, Gödel, Kleene, von Neumann, Shannon, and others on computability, in parallel lines, throughly studied in detail, permit us to interpret ahead the evolving realm of programming languages. The proper line from lambda-calculus, to the Algol-family, the declarative and procedural split with the C language and Prolog, and the ensuing branching and programming languages explosion and further delimitation, are thereupon inspected as to relate them with the proper syntax, semantics and philosophical élan of logic programming and Prolog

Hypothesis Generation and Pursuit in Scientific Reasoning

This thesis draws a distinction between (i) reasoning about which scientific hypothesis to accept, (ii) reasoning concerned with generating new hypotheses and (iii) reasoning about which hypothesis to pursue. I argue that (ii) and (iii) should be evaluated according to the same normative standard, namely whether the hypotheses generated/selected are pursuit worthy. A consequentialist account of pursuit worthiness is defended, based on C. S. Peirce’s notion of ‘abduction’ and the ‘economy of research’, and developed as a family of formal, decision-theoretic models. This account is then deployed to discuss four more specific topics concerning scientific reasoning. First, I defend an account according to which explanatory reasoning (including the ‘inference to the best explanation’) mainly provides reasons for pursuing hypotheses, and criticise empirical arguments for the view that it also provides reasons for acceptance. Second, I discuss a number of pursuit worthiness accounts of analogical reasoning in science, arguing that, in some cases, analogies allow scientists to transfer an already well-understood modelling framework to a new domain. Third, I discuss the use of analogies within archaeological theorising, arguing that the distinction between using analogies for acceptance, generation and pursuit is implicit in methodological discussions in archaeology. A philosophical analysis of these uses is presented. Fourth, diagnostic reasoning in medicine is analysed from the perspective of Peircean abduction, where the conception of abduction as strategic reasoning is shown to be particularly important