Publication: Can’t Software Malfunction

Our paper was published earlier this month. In the paper we investigate an argument that all software failures are due to design errors, and software engineers are to blame. The argument presupposes that software is self-contained, and fixes the behavior of machines on which it is run. We argue that these presuppositions are untenable in light of the complexity of (modern) software and computer architectures. Questions of what failed, why it failed, and who—if anyone—could have anticipated the failure, generally do not have a single, clear answer.

The article was published in an open access journal. Anyone can download, read, and copy it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

de Haas, J. and Houkes, W. 2025. Can’t Software Malfunction? Metaphysics, 8(1), pp. 1–15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/met.165