When scientists develop computer technologies, they focus on making the machine work reliably and efficiently, and human moral values are not often part of the equation. Perhaps this is due to the belief that technology has a value-neutral nature, and that issues of value are better left to philosophers. Batya Friedman, however, disputes this assumption with arguments that reveal the links between human values and computer technology.
Bringing together leading researchers and system designers, Friedman addresses fascinating and rich questions in "Human Values and the Design of Computer...

Donald Knuth's influence in computer science ranges from the invention of methods for translating and defining programming languages to the creation of the TeX and METAFONT systems for desktop publishing. His award-winning textbooks have become classics; his scientific papers are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide range of topics. The present volume, which is the fourth in a series of his collected works, is devoted to an important subfield of Computer Science that Knuth founded in the 1960s and still considers his main life's work. This field, to which he...

Interrogative constructions are the linguistic forms by which questions are expressed. Their analysis is of great interest to linguists, as well as to computer scientists, human-computer interface designers, and philosophers. Interrogative constructions have played a central role in the development of modern syntactic theory. Nonetheless, to date most syntactic work has taken place quite separately from formal semantic and pragmatic work on interrogatives. Although there has by now been a significant amount of work on interrogatives across a variety of languages, there exist few syntactic and...

The early papers collected here trace a trajectory through the work and thinking of Charles Fillmore over his long and distinguished career--reflecting his desire to make sense of the workings of language in a way that keeps in mind questions of language form, language use, and the conventions linking form, meaning, and practice.

The use of diagrams in logic and geometry has encountered resistance in recent years. For a proof to be valid in geometry, it must not rely on the graphical properties of a diagram. In logic, the teaching of proofs depends on sentenial representations, ideas formed as natural language sentences such as "If A is true and B is true...." No serious formal proof system is based on diagrams.
This book explores the reasons why structured graphics have been largely ignored in contemporary formal theories of axiomatic systems. In particular, it elucidates the systematic forces in the intellectual...

In our multimedia age, text description presents many conceptual problems: texts, as cultural objects, cannot be interpreted without descriptions of genre, communicative conditions, and language, which positivist approaches have proved unable to provide. "Semantics for Descriptions" addresses itself as much to linguists as to computer scientists, arguing that rational hermeneutics can offer better descriptive methods by allowing the theoretical and practical conditions of text interpretation to be defined.