Philosophy Glossary

Browse 13 philosophy terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

13 Philosophy Terms

AI Alignment Debate
The ongoing argument over how serious AI alignment risks are, what kinds of harms matter most, and how systems should be governed or constrained.
Chinese Room
A philosophical thought experiment proposed by John Searle to argue that symbol manipulation alone may not constitute genuine understanding, even if outputs...
Code First
Describing an approach that begins from code or implementation rather than from documentation, schemas, or visual design. In culture discussions code first can...
Copyleft
A licensing philosophy that uses copyright law to require that modified versions of a work must also be distributed under the same terms. A deliberate...
First Principle
A foundational assumption or basic truth from which further reasoning can be built. In tech culture, talking from first principles usually means trying to...
First Principles Thinking
Breaking down problems to their fundamental truths and reasoning up from there, rather than reasoning by analogy. Popularized in tech by Elon Musk. Powerful...
FOSS
Free and Open Source Software — an umbrella term covering both the Free Software Foundation's ethically motivated 'free software' and the more pragmatically...
Ghost in the Machine
Originally a philosophical phrase, now often used to describe behavior in a machine or system that feels strangely human, mysterious, or hard to explain. In...
GNU Manifesto
Richard Stallman's foundational essay arguing for software freedom and the GNU project, widely cited in free-software history.
Hacker Ethic
A set of values associated with early hacker culture, including curiosity, hands-on learning, openness, and skepticism of centralized control.
Open Source
Open Source refers to software whose source code is publicly available, allowing anyone to view, modify, distribute, and use it, typically under a license that...
Ship of Theseus (Codebase)
The philosophical question applied to software: if every line of code has been replaced over time, is it still the same project? Every long-lived codebase...
Worse Is Better
A software-design idea arguing that simpler, more pragmatic systems often win adoption over theoretically cleaner but more complex alternatives.

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