I read Scott Aaronson's paper "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" a few years ago. It can be found at: https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf
The idea is that this discipline can help inform philosophy. The discipline of computational complexity with its roots in the work of Turing, Godel, Kolmogorov, Chaitin and others can make philosophical questions more tractable and perhaps susceptible to answers. Does anyone know of any working philosophers who have taken up the call? Or is anyone aware of published works that have attempted to reduce philosophical questions to the language of computational complexity?
@Jakub Szymanik invokes* computational complexity while working on issues in philosophy of language/linguistics.
There’re also some ostensibly philosophical articles in The SAGE Handbook of Complexity and Management.
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* Your term "reduce" is asking for more than you're likely to find.
Interesting inquiry. I am following. I have looked at some articles in the handbook suggested by Dr. Karl right now and they are really valuable. I will share further views later. Kind regards
Thank you for the reference Karl. In reviewing some of my resources and notes on the subject, I realize that at least one academic has combined computational complexity and philosophy, see Kevin T. Kelly, et al. titled "Church's Thesis & Hume's Problem" in the book by Chiara, et al. "Logic and Scientific Method" (1995). Kelly also wrote a dissertation titled "The Automated Discovery of Universal Theories" (1986) which has extensive discussion of philosophy and computational complexity. Kelly is the only philosopher I've found so far. And note the years of publication. They predate Aaronson by decades! He also has a paper in the book edited by Baltag, et al. "Johan van Benthem on Logic and Information Dynamics" (2014). The book contains other articles that combine the two fields. Kelly is at Carnegie Mellon and has a long list of his published works at: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/kk3n/homepage/kelly.html. Well, I guess that's a pretty good start.
I also found the book edited by B. J. Copeland, et al. "Computability: Turing, Gödel, Church, and Beyond" (2013) which contains the paper referenced above by Aaronson. It also contains a number of other papers relevant to this question.
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