Adding Methodological Testing to Naur's Anti-formalism

In late 2011 Turing Award winner Peter Naur published an extremely interesting book [23] in the form of an interview. The book strongly criticizes formalist computer science. Naur’s characterization of computational thinking is superior to previous criticisms because he understands that computer science has become ”cognitive information processing”. Naur states ”mental life during the twentieth century has become entirely misguided into an ideological position such that only discussions that adopt the computer inspired form” are accepted [22, p. 87]. This formalist conception of the nature of human cognition now dominates not just theoretical computing, but also computer program development, social sciences, philosophy of science and is even currently advocated as a replacement for physics [1, p.1]. The book Conversations Pluralism in Software Engineering is particularly valuable because Naur provides background knowledge and explains the evolution of his current thinking. In addition, the interviews make Naur’s publications more easily accessible by giving URL’s for some of his more recent works and by providing detailed references for his earlier works during his amazing 60 year career as a leading founder of computing. My goal in this paper is to supplement Naur’s criticism by describing a different philosophical tradition that adds methodological testing to Naur’s critical philosophy. Naur’s criticism of AI and the mechanical cognitive metaphor is unrivaled, but in my view Naur does not provide any prescriptive guidance to scientists and philosophers for choosing between alternative methodologies and does not provide assistance so that scientists can test research programmes. After summarizing Naur’s criticism, I discuss a related philosophical tradition that when added to Naur’s, allows methodological testing of computer dataology and scientific methods and theories. The tradition is called “the methodology of scientific research programmes” (MSRP) [14] and was developed by philosopher Imre Lakatos as an antidote to computer inspired forms of thought. MSRP is the culmination of anti-formalism through the study of method started by the founders of modern physics and continued by the Vienna Circle. Next, four different criticisms of structured programming are discussed including my 1970s criticism that explicitly attempted to apply MSRP. The remainder of the paper discusses anomalies and problems that need to be studied with this new methodology in a post computer inspired methods world.