On the Rationale for SPaDE

In keeping with my own mental preoccupations, and perhaps with what I know and what I can do, the SPaDE project combines philosophy and engineering, in a way which may be tenuously linked to the connection between logical positivism and science, particularly in the work of Rudolf Carnap.

This has a substantial effect on both the philosophy and the engineering, which is reflected in my speaking of them as “synthetic philosophy” and “deductive engineering”, and in the way that the two are combined in the project.

A reader who is better aligned to either one of those disciplines may find the material on that side an easier way in to the project.

In the course of my own deliberations about the rationality of society in general and that of analytic philosophers in particular, I have been provoked at first into consideration of key aspects of analytic philosophy, and then into the evolution of intelligence and of culture.

That interest in evolution has proven to be a very important element in the rationale for the SPaDE project, and may perhaps be thought of as a third pillar, alongside synthetic philosophy and deductive engineering, supporting the rationale for the project and providing a context for it.

The project is rendered concrete and constructive by is intent to deliver open source software supporting deductive methods in the context of a distributed repository of declarative knowledge. But there is a greater ambition in which the philosophical elements not only serve the engineering, but are conceived of having perhaps a more enduring value than anything I could accomplish in what is left of my life, even supposing I survive to be aided by artificial super-intelligence.