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The Philosophy of Computer Science

plato.stanford.edu

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Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#2

Post by Maursault »

> and from the practice of software development and its commercial and industrial deployment. More specifically, the philosophy of computer science considers the ontology and epistemology of computational systems, focusing on problems associated with their specification, programming, implementation, verification and testing.

Well, Stanford doesn't have a clue what Computer Science is and isn't and is apparently trying to drum up admissions with slick, sexy and false advertising.

CS has zero to do with computers (with the exception of the computer scientist themselves, they are the computer), and it certainly isn't programming. It's math, you fools!

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#3

Post by somethingsaid »

Maursault wrote: post #2

> and from the practice of software development and its commercial and industrial deployment. More specifically, the philosophy of computer science considers the ontology and epistemology of computational systems, focusing on problems associated with their specification, programming, implementation, verification and testing. Well, Stanford doesn't have a clue what Computer Science is and isn't and is apparently tryin…

There’s literally a whole section covering if CS should be considered math, engineering or science.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#4

Post by Animats »

That reads like the successor to Prof. John McCarthy's "Epistemological Problems in Artificial Intelligence" class, which I once took, back in the days of logical inference and expert systems. AI people thought back then that if you thought about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it. That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly 1985-2005) followed.

That class was known informally as "Dr. John's Mystery Hour".

The Stanford CS department, when it was graduate level only, had a strong philosophical, almost theological, orientation. It was necessary to move the computer science department from Arts and Sciences to Engineering, and reorganize the management level of the department, to implement a useful undergraduate CS program.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#5

Post by shagie »

Different professor (and no longer downloadable) Philosophy of Computer Science from buffalo.edu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20912718 (and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10388603 )

The author of the Buffalo tome is https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/ which links to a number of other resources too.

> The table of contents alone (19 pages) is an extraordinarily good outline of what CS is, and what the major components and questions of it are.

> This looks awesome. It's a huge book though; this draft is 824 pages! Still, definitely looking forward to reading this... eventually.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#7

Post by f1shy »

Animats wrote: post #4

That reads like the successor to Prof. John McCarthy's "Epistemological Problems in Artificial Intelligence" class, which I once took, back in the days of logical inference and expert systems. AI people thought back then that if you thought about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it. That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly 1985-2005) followed. That class was known informally…

AFAIK the AI winter was more related to the Minsky paper, and the hype and no delivery of the over-promisses made by the industry.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#8

Post by natt941 »

Just to be clear, this content isn't from Stanford per se, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an academic publication that's hosted by Stanford (and was started by and continues to be run by Stanford faculty, but is mostly written by academics elsewhere and has some form of peer-review).

Some SEP articles are extremely high quality, I can't speak to the quality of this one but "philosophy of CS" as construed here feels pretty niche inside philosophy. There's lots of CS-related work being done by people in philosophy departments—algorithmic fairness, for example—that isn't covered by this article.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#9

Post by eimrine »

shagie wrote: post #5

Different professor (and no longer downloadable) Philosophy of Computer Science from buffalo.edu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20912718 (and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10388603 ) The author of the Buffalo tome is https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/ which links to a number of other resources too. > The table of contents alone (19 pages) is an extraordinarily good outline of what CS is, and what the maj…

Any ways to download that book which is no longer downloadable? Could you share some link or something helpful to find it?
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