Towards a hermeneutic definition of software

Abstract The paper intends to establish a comprehensive definition of software from a postphenomenological and hermeneutic point of view. It intends to show the contribution of continental philosophy to the study of new technologies. In section “Introduction: why do we need a comprehensive definition of software?,” I underline the need for a philosophical analysis that can highlight the multifaceted and paradoxical nature of software. In section “Engineering in written form: the five criteria,” starting from some remarks on the history of programming languages, I define a list of minimal requirements (five criteria) that something needs to meet to be qualified as software. All these requirements share two essential features: the written form and the effectiveness, that is, the need to be executed by a physical machine. In section “Software as text: a hermeneutic model,” I focus on software as form of writing. I develop this idea by using Ricoeur’s hermeneutic model. I claim that software is a type of text. In section “The grammatology of microprocessor,” I focus on the second aforementioned feature: the effectiveness of software. I claim that this effectiveness is based on the analogy between electric circuitries and Boolean logic. Software is a writing and re-writing process that implies an interpretation on two levels, epistemological and ontological.