Juliette KENNEDY
On the problem of cultural influence
Quand?
12 octobre 2022, mercredi
18h-19h30, en ligne
RESUME
In 1936 Church coined the phrase “Turing Machine” to describe Turing’s mathematical model, and in so doing he enabled one of the oldest and most powerful metaphors ever to enter the sciences---the machine metaphor.
1936 was a watershed year for computability. Debates among Gödel, Church and others over the correct analysis of the intuitive concept “human effectively computable,” an analysis at the heart of the Incompleteness Theorems, the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of what a finite computation is, and most urgently---for Gödel---the generality of the Incompleteness Theorems, which depends in turn on a precise understanding of the notion of “formal system”---were definitively set to rest with the appearance, in that year, of the Turing Machine.
Gödel was emphatically convinced by the adequacy of Turing’s model, where he had been previously unconvinced by the adequacy of all of the other models that had been proposed in the period 1931-36, including his own, the class of Herbrand-Gödel recursive functions; but Church and others had also expressed themselves in similar terms at the time, about their own systems, also in their later writings.
The mathematical facts are well known. The question I wish to explore in this talk is, do the mathematical facts exhaust what is to be said about the thinking behind the “confluence of ideas in 1936”? Or might there be still more to be said, and from another direction entirely, the direction of cultural influence?
The assimilation of Turing’s work occurred during a period of high Modernism in American culture; and within Modernism a high point of technological optimism, and what Caroline Jones, in her The Machine in the Studio, refers to as the technological sublime. And indeed, one cannot help noticing certain parallels between these events in the foundations of mathematics of the period, and developments central to the Modernist culture of the first half of the 20th century---a culture whose icon, if it could be thought of as having one, is surely the machine.
Programme de séances à venir:
https://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/grandes-conferences-des-archives-henri-poincare
9 novembre 2022 (en ligne) | Fabrice Correia (Université de Genève)
Fondamental ? Mais en quel sens ?
7 décembre 2022 (à Nancy) | Sebastien Gandon (Centre Philosophies et rationalités, Université Clermont Auvergne)
Russell global. Pour une histoire des réceptions de la philosophie analytique
18 janvier 2023 (à Nancy) | Anna Marmodoro (Université de Durham / Corpus Christi College à l'Université d'Oxford)
Power in Nature
15 février 2023 (à Nancy) | Roger Pouivet (Archives Henri Poincaré – AHP-PReST, Université de Lorraine)
L’apologie de la métaphysique
1 mars 2023 (à Nancy) | Philippe Huneman (Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques – CNRS / Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne)
titre à venir
12 avril 2023 (à Nancy) | Clémence Lebosse (Archives Henri Poincaré – AHP-PReST, Université de Lorraine)
Education physique, sciences et gouvernement des corps au cours du second XXe siècle
19 avril 2023 (à Strasbourg) |Stéphanie Ruphy (Ecole normale supérieure – Université PSL, Paris / République des Savoirs / Centre Cavaillès)
Les mérites de la démocratie participative sont-ils transposables à la recherche scientifique ? Apports (et risques) des sciences participatives et citoyennes
10 mai 2023 (à Nancy) | Liesbeth de Mols (STL – Savoirs, Textes, Langage – CNRS / Université de Lille)
titre à venir
7 juin 2023 (à Nancy) | Hugo Mercier (Institut Jean Nicod / Ecole normale supérieure – PSL)
Pour raisonner bien, raisonnons ensemble