Excerpt: Not only the historical development of informatics as a scientific and technical discipline but also its core problems are, prima facie, far removed from philosophical developments arising from soft sciences such as hermeneutics, and closer to logic or the philosophy of science. Is the relationship between informatics and hermeneutics of any mutual relevance? What happens when we reflect hermeneutically on the foundations of informatics? Winograd and Flores have made the attempt, and one result was their insight into “the non-obviousness of the rationalistic orientation” of informatics. Consequently, they found themselves “deeply concerned with the question of language.” My purpose is to show why Winograd and Flores have grasped, on the one hand, some key issues of Heidegger’s hermeneutics, while at the same time distorting some of his insights, particularly with regard to science and information technology.

Excerpt: I will take you on a tour through the idea of reality construction by travelling back and forth between the two intellectual strands in the process of modernization: the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The major part of our tour will be spent in the land of Romanticism, accepting without argument the kind of irrealism propounded by constructivists like Nelson Goodman, Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida. But throughout I will try to give the Enlightenment its due by pointing out the important roles of technology in the processes of reality construction: in material constructions, as a basis for thought experiments, as provider of intellectual tools, and as a source for constructivist ideas in general.

Key words: Enlightenment, Romanticism, Goodman, Rorty, Derrida, irrealism, social constructivism, material construction

Excerpt: I would like to present a view of software development as an insight-building process in terms of multiperspectivity, self-organization and dialogue, drawing on epistemological ideas that have emerged from the discourse in Rational Constructivism.

Key words: Radical Constructivism, multiperspectivity, software development, design, Heinz von Foerster

Excerpt: This short paper is intended to suggest why computer scientists might be interested in the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein and others, and to stimulate some further thought about some of the questions that they address. Although Heidegger did not write very much that is explicitly about formal logic, what he did write is quite pertinent, and much of his other work is relevant to questions of meaning in the larger sense. Wittgenstein was concerned with the limits of language, that is, with “what cannot be said.” We will see that their views are fundamentally opposed to those of logical positivists such as Carnap, as well as to the whole Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy, and in particular, to Russell and Moore. We will also see some interesting parallels to Buddhist philosophy. At the end of the paper we return to consider what all this has to do with computing.

Key words: Truth, meaning, formalism, Heidegger, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Nothing, computing