Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing: Turing 100

368 Pages·2017·6.79 MB·English

by  Juliet Floyd

Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science 324
Juliet Floyd
Alisa Bokulich Editors
Philosophical
Explorations of
the Legacy of
Alan Turing
Turing 100
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History
of Science
Volume 324
Editors
Alisa Bokulich, Boston University
Robert S. Cohen, Boston University
Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 
Kostas Gavroglu, University of Athens 
Managing Editor
Lindy Divarci, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 
Editorial Board
Theodore Arabatzis, University of Athens 
Heather E. Douglas, University of Waterloo 
Jean Gayon, Université Paris 1 
Thomas F. Glick, Boston University 
Hubert Goenner, University of Goettingen 
John Heilbron, University of California, Berkeley 
Diana Kormos-Buchwald, California Institute of Technology 
Christoph Lehner, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 
Peter McLaughlin, Universität Heidelberg 
Agustí Nieto-Galan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 
Nuccio Ordine, Universitá della Calabria 
Sylvan S. Schweber, Harvard University 
Ana Simões, Universidade de Lisboa 
John J. Stachel, Boston University
Baichun Zhang, Chinese Academy of Science
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5710
Juliet Floyd • Alisa Bokulich
Editors
Philosophical Explorations
of the Legacy of Alan Turing
Turing 100
Editors
Juliet Floyd Alisa Bokulich
Department of Philosophy Department of Philosophy
Boston University Boston University
Boston, MA, USA Boston, MA, USA
ISSN 0068-0346 ISSN 2214-7942 (electronic)
Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science
ISBN 978-3-319-53278-3 ISBN 978-3-319-53280-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53280-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936968
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors
or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims
in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This volume is dedicated to the memory of
two of our participants in the
“Turing 100” session of the Boston
Colloquium for Philosophy of Science,
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016)
and
S. Barry Cooper (1943–2015)
who, like Turing, have contributed so much
to these topics and whose insights and
presence will be greatly missed.
Preface
On November 11 and 12 of 2012, we celebrated the centenary of Alan Turing’s
(1912–1954) birth with a session of the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of
Science titled “Turing 100,” which was co-sponsored by the Center for Philosophy
and History of Science and the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and
Computational Science and Engineering, both centers of excellence here at Boston
University. We invited a distinguished team of philosophers, mathematicians, logi-
cians, historians, computer scientists, and cryptographers to our event—among
them four Turing Award winners, the highest honor now given in computer science:
Marvin Minsky (1969), Michael O. Rabin (1976), Ron Rivest (2002), and Silvio
Micali (2012). Other speakers included Juliette Kennedy, Martin Davis, Gerald
Sacks, Theodore Slaman, Craig Bauer, Patrick Henry Winston, S. Barry Cooper,
Wilfrid Sieg, Stephen Wolfram, Rohit Parikh, Mark Hogarth, Rod Downey, and
Leonid Levin. Appropriately, each speaker reflected on foundational issues with
power and imagination in Turing’s spirit, representing a number of different fields
in which speculation, rigorous mathematics, good sense, and simplicity are valued.
A record of their talks and slides may be found at http://www.bu.edu/cphs/
colloquium/2012–2013/#turing. “Turing 100” attracted a large audience and gener-
ated a lively discussion, closing out the Alan Turing Year in style.
A host of meetings took place around the world in 2012, which was known to
users of the Internet as “The Alan Turing Year.” Several recent volumes have
appeared, or are slated to appear, aiming to bring the importance of Turing’s ideas
and life to a wider, more variegated public. Our Boston University “Turing 100”
meeting was distinctive, however, in addressing itself specifically to the philosophi-
cal legacy of Turing’s work. We asked our participants to consider foundational
motives and methods, as well as look forward to the frontiers of the more applied
philosophical regions of Turing’s ideas. Turing counts as one of the twentieth cen-
tury’s most important scientists—if not one of the most influential scientists of all
time—and we wanted to explore his philosophical sensibility and contributions to
general issues of philosophical importance. Philosophy, and the philosophy of sci-
ence more specifically, often plays a central role when it comes to revolutionary
periods in science, and Turing is like many of the other great scientists in this regard.
vii
viii Preface
The purpose of our volume is to show how Turing’s distinctive way of thinking
promoted a panoply of ideas and outstanding questions crucial to the history and
philosophy of science.
In discussing Turing’s philosophical legacy, we must also note the important
moral and political dimensions of his life and death. Turing died in 1954, age 41,
apparently by suicide, having chosen to undergo chemical castration to correct his
homosexuality rather than face a year in prison for “gross indecency.” Though it
may not, in the end, surprise us, it must surely concern us that an ostensibly demo-
cratically liberal state claiming to have been fighting the tyranny of dictatorship
would willingly—and legally—so persecute one of its most able scientists and pro-
tectors. In the fall of 2008, an Internet campaign generated the then-largest petition
for a pardon in the history of Britain; a royal pardon was issued on Christmas Eve,
2013. But this was only the beginning. On February 25, 2015, the day after the
Oscar Award Ceremony for the film “The Imitation Game” (2014), Turing’s great-
nephew and great-niece presented a petition signed by even more people—half a
million on change.org—demanding the pardon of 49,000 men unjustly convicted of
gross indecency before 2003 (when homosexuality was fully legalized in Britain).
Turing’s grand-niece put it perfectly: “It is illogical that my great uncle has been the
only one to be pardoned when so many were convicted of the same crime.” In
February 2017 “Turing’s Law” passed in the United Kingdom, automatically par-
doning deceased men—including Turing himself—convicted for consensual same-
sex relations before homosexuality was decriminalised, and opening up procedures
for men living with convictions to apply to have their names cleared. It is a true
irony of history that through the Internet itself—using devices instantiating Turing’s
very idea of a “Turing machine”—the sense of justice of hundreds of thousands of
offended individuals could be pooled to such positive effect in Turing’s name.
We think this volume is a fitting and unique tribute to the breadth and depth of
Turing’s philosophical side and a strong and stimulating contribution to our long-
standing Springer series, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science.
Boston, MA, USA Juliet Floyd
March 2015 Alisa Bokulich
Acknowledgments
We received generous funding for “Turing 100” from our two Boston University
co-sponsors: the Center for Philosophy and History of Science and the Rafik
B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science and Engineering.
They are two truly interdisciplinary centers of intellectual excellence, one with a
long tradition and the other a promising new one: we are grateful for their support.
In addition to offering us financial support, Program Committee members Azer
Bestavros and Steven Homer offered especially sage advice and helped us to attract
a truly distinguished speaker list. We are grateful to the Department of Computer
Science at Boston University for lending us their hands.
Finally we are grateful to several talented graduate students who helped us with
the manuscript at various stages along the way. In particular, we are grateful to
Katherine Valde for proofreading the entire manuscript before submission, Jared
Henderson for managing timely conversion of documents from LaTex to Word, and
Kurt Blankschaen for helping us with the index. We express our final thanks to the
Department of Philosophy at Boston University for supporting this good work of
our graduate students.
ix
Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Juliet Floyd
Part I Logic and Mathematics to Philosophy
2 Turing, the Mathematician . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Daniele Mundici and Wilfried Sieg
3 Turing, Gödel and the “Bright Abyss” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Juliette Kennedy
4 Justified True Belief: Plato, Gettier, and Turing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Rohit Parikh and Adriana Renero
5 T uring on “Common Sense”: Cambridge Resonances . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Juliet Floyd
Part II The Universal Machine: From Music to Morphogenesis
6 Universality Is Ubiquitous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Martin Davis
7 The Early History of Voice Encryption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Craig Bauer
8 Turing and the History of Computer Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
B. Jack Copeland and Jason Long
9 Exploring the Frontiers of Computation: Measurement
Based Quantum Computers and the Mechanistic
View of Computation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Armond Duwell
10 Embodying Computation at Higher Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
S. Barry Cooper
xi