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The Philosophy of Computer Science

plato.stanford.edu

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t names always referential, in the sense of refering to a meaning or in the abstract, some memory or experience, or even future experiences, that an interpreter has/is/will have? So is the issue you point out that the names are heavily loaded and proper nouns? And how is that at the cost of information transfer (one might argue it transfers more information since you are sending “heavy words” which decompress to…

> direct information transfer

Well, all information transfer involves indirection by name, so what you’re getting at is that this lies on a spectrum where the words use are “heavy” and involve lookups where the definitions aren’t in the reader’s cache already? I’m pointing to a parallel here for similar “lookups” in the interpretation of a program by computer ... so maybe the issue is the programs analogous to the way this page is written involve like far network fetches.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this? To me, Plato seems like a fairly good fit for the computer world. I also think that, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, OO patterns make some kind of sense - since they allow us to clarify problems as being subsets of more general ones.

I'm sure that most people who have studied OO would find many similarities with Plato's forms. The same could be said of Spinoza's attributes, however the latter is much more abstract (to say the least). Without digressing too much from the topic however, I think OO has it's place. Sometimes it's rather like constructing scaffolding prior to building a small dog house, unnecessarily complex.

I’d think that inheritance makes oo closer to Aristotle’s categories.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, because it keeps you from wasting time. Computer programming is applied analytic philosophy and unfortunately very few people realize this. For example, if more people knew about the shortcomings of Platonism, we wouldn't be wasting time on idiotic fads like OO patterns.

Should people work on OpenSource at all after reading Niccolò Machiavelli?

Yes.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#24
post #6

Honest question: is this useful?

Sure: It's designed, like any qualitative model, to yield leverage. Know the laws, understand the principles, and soon you can pull off something amazing. Maybe it guides you into a career path within the broad field of CS, or perhaps you use the principles as metaphor-templates for your personal CS education. "In what way could this Hello World program be described as a mathematical object? Is it an axiomatic theory…

I think the problem with communicating a logical chain of thought is that it presupposes the idea that logic is immutable and continuous throughout the chain. In sciences, logic is usually fairly immutable because it's not the object of study, so you can show the ideas, without context, and they'll make sense because the frame of reference is constant.

In philosophy, it's usually the case that if you simply presented the idea, without reference to the thinker, you'd definitely provoke misunderstandings, if not incomprehension. Philosophers don't have a common conceptual vocabulary, so when you think a given thinker is referring to a given idea (say, logic) you can really only say for certain that they're referring to their understanding of the idea.

Further, they don't have a common vocabulary for describing ideas - often to the point that you get 'young' and 'old' versions of the same thinker (for instance, Hume) because they use words in different ways within their own corpus.

So, if you wanted to present a logical chain of ideas, you'd have to develop first, your own logic that is a superset of all the contained systems of thought. Then, you'd have to develop a vocabulary that unifies disparate concepts without reducing their complexity.

Predictably, most philosophers have come to the conclusion it's easier just to organize thought by thinkers rather than ideas. Non-philosophers tend to see this as some kind of veiled appeal to authority - but it isn't really. Philosophers are very happy to pervert, break, or alter the corpus of a given thinker in order to do something new with it.

The strength of philosophy depends on rigorous questioning, and rigorous questioning does not tend to lead to monolithic bodies of thought - and that's what you'd need to produce the kind of logical and lexical superset an idea-oriented approach would need to be practical. Without substantial agreement on very many basic questions, such an approach would undoubtedly just do violence to the ideas.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#25
The really interesting philosophies emerge from the trenches and the battles in the field. For example, the most surprising meta-level insights on randomness come from Nassim Taleb's decade-long experience in trading securities. What he writes, is truly striking. The article in the link, however, make no reference to such real-world starting points. It fails to emerge from the very practical. It does not gradually abstract away details in order to arrive at surprising insights at the meta-level. The verifiable path is simply gone. It is much more an example in the art of mediocre teaching. I personally think that it is a useless read.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#27
post #14
post #6

Honest question: is this useful?

Absolutely, because it keeps you from wasting time. Computer programming is applied analytic philosophy and unfortunately very few people realize this. For example, if more people knew about the shortcomings of Platonism, we wouldn't be wasting time on idiotic fads like OO patterns.

I'd also like to hear more about what you mean. I imagine 'Platonism' refers to his theory of the forms, which as an example of abstraction seems pretty useful, if taken in his case to an extreme. He seems pretty solid on modeling problems without getting caught up in implementation details, at least.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#30
post #26

Props to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, it’s perhaps the best general resource on philosophy on the web

It’s a great example of what an editorialized online encyclopedia can be. Would love to learn about other such resources for other fields.
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