Turing, Wittgenstein, and Emergence
Juliet Floyd · 2016
Abstract Emerging media are a product of the digital world that Alan Turing fathered. In 1936 Turing transformed the ancient notion of algorithm—by the 1920s central to mathematical logic—into the idea of a stored program computer. He based this transformation on the notion of a human “computor” calculating with pencil and paper, thereby envisioning the far-reaching implications of this work for everyday life. Like the philosopher Wittgenstein, with whom he discussed the foundations of mathematics, Turing recast the notions of truth and ontology by taking what we say and do as part of the world. The key philosophical ideas here are those of an interface and of the emergence of meaning. First, complexity and meaning are, in general, unforeseeable, while emerging in use. Second, what people say and what they mean can and often do diverge. Third, by using emerging media we can study such phenomena.