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\title{Example of Reductionism and Bracketing}
\author{Greg Hudson}
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\maketitle

I will examine the phenomenon of writing a computer program from both
a reductionist and a phenomenological perspective.  From the
reductionist perspective, you may see a person typing on a keyboard
connected to a computer with a disk and a monitor.  The keyboard has
keys with certain physical properties (e.g. they require a certain
amount of force to depress, and return to position with a certain
springiness).  When keys are depressed, they cause certain electrical
impulses to appear in the computer's memory and they cause the pattern
of pixels on the screen to change.  While this description may help
determine why programmers often get carpal tunnel syndrome, it does
not tell you anything about computer programs, or even distinguish
computer programming from writing a paper.

Using bracketing to describe this phenomenon, we first note a
relationship between the general act of writing a computer program (a
feature which is unthematically copresent) and the computer program in
particular that is being written.  Neither of these functionalities
``are'' anywhere (though there may be a representation of part of the
program ``in'' the computer's disk, or ``in'' the programmer's mind);
they depend on the context of the motivation for writing the computer
program and other features.  The functional structure of a computer
program has many layers: for example, there is a relationship of
Fundierung between the program and the syntactic parse tree of the
program, between the parse tree of the program and the lexical tokens
used to write the program, between the lexical tokens and their
symbolic representations (letters and punctuation), between the
symbolic representation of the tokens and their representation in the
computer's memory or on its disk.  Note that below the level of the
program, any of the factivities could be replaced with a different
factivity; for instance, the syntax tree of the program could be
represented as a diagram rather than as lexical tokens.  Lastly, it is
the motivated viewing of a program as a program that makes it into a
program; if no one cares to view a sequence of symbols as a computer
program, then it is just a sequence of symbols.

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