Abstract. The notion that software could be independently and usefully creative is becoming more commonplace in scientific, cultural, business and public circles. It is not fanciful to imagine creative software embedded in society in the short to medium term, acting as collaborators and autonomous creative agents for much societal benefit. Technologically, there is still some way to go to enable Artificial Intelligence methods to create artefacts and ideas of value, and to get software to do so in interesting and engaging ways. There are also a number of sociological hurdles to overcome in getting society to accept software as being truly creative, and we concentrate on those here. We discuss the various communities that can be considered stakeholders in the perception of computers being creative or not. In particular, we look in detail at three sets of stakeholders, namely the general public, Computational Creativity researchers and fellow creatives. We put forward various philosophical points which we argue will shape the way in which society accepts creative software. We make various claims along the way about how people perceive software as being creative or not, which we believe should be addressed with scientific experimentation, and we call on the Computational Creativity research community to do just that.

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Analysis of online mathematics forums can help reveal how explanation is used by mathematicians; we contend that this use of explanation may help to provide an informal conceptualization of simplicity. We extracted six conjectures from recent philosophical work on the occurrence and characteristics of explanation in mathematics. We then tested these conjectures against a corpus derived from online mathematical discussions. To this end, we employed two techniques, one based on indicator terms, the other on a random sample of comments lacking such indicators. Our findings suggest that explanation is widespread in mathematical practice and that it occurs not only in proofs but also in other mathematical contexts. Our work also provides further evidence for the utility of empirical methods in addressing philosophical problems. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The notion of ‘simple proof’ - Hilbert's 24th problem’.

The Argument Web is maturing as both a platform built upon a synthesis of many contemporary theories of argumentation in philosophy and also as an ecosystem in which various applications and application components are contributed by different research groups around the world. It already hosts the largest publicly accessible corpora of argumentation and has the largest number of interoperable and cross compatible tools for the analysis, navigation and evaluation of arguments across a broad range of domains, languages and activity types. Such interoperability is key in allowing innovative combinations of tool and data reuse that can further catalyse the development of the field of computational argumentation. The aim of this paper is to summarise the key foundations, the recent advances and the goals of the Argument Web, with a particular focus on demonstrating the relevance to, and roots in, philosophical argumentation theory.