Philosophy and Computer Science Revisited 204
Soren Kierkegaard writes "While reading the two-and-a-half-year-old Slashdot post on Does Philosophy have a role in Computer Science, it occurred to me that over these past few years Philosophy has a more prominent role in Computer Science then ever before. Cognitive Science and Computer Ethics are more established disciplines in universities, and the numbers of philosophy graduates double majoring in computer science and information systems are climbing. Is a merger of Philosophy, a discipline steeped in history and intelligent thought, and Computer Science, a discipline that looks to the future, the best of both worlds?"
Everyone should study some philosophy (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, whether that's in a formal course like "Philosophy 101" or whether it's embedded in other courses, like ethics course content spread throughout an engineering curriculum or programming philosophies spread throughout programming courses, isn't all that important.
What is important is that by the time you graduate, you understand both why there are so many different world views for "big picture" things like the responsibilities of citizens, the rights of individuals vs. the rights of the collective or state, etc. as well as why there are different views on "details" like different coding standards and different standards of business ethics.
By knowing many of these views and by understanding why different people have different views, you will be better prepared to know why you adopt the views you adopt, and be able to explain your reasons to others. You will also be better equipped to understand why your boss or coworker may have a different view, and whether that difference is a reason for you to re-evaluate your views, agree to disagree, or circulate your resume.
This is why philosophy should be taught in school. Graduates should also continue a lifetime of self-study.
Hasn't anybody read (Score:4, Insightful)
I Think You're Reaching There (Score:5, Insightful)
Having worked as a developer for 5 years since finishing grad school, I've been discouraged to find that the points of contact between philosophy and CS are VERY few and far between. Studying philosophy will definitely sharpen your reading, writing, and analytical skills, all of which are (or should be, if you're doing your job right) useful for programmers. But those are all general skills; my knowledge of philosophical theories or history or personalities are, frankly, never a part of my work life.
I think that still holds true in all but rare cases. It's unfortunate but I made a reference to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason a few months ago at work. Someone had just read The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins and I asked them if he was referring to Kant's "Prime Mover" or "Watch Maker" ... and everyone promptly drew a blank. My actual work is even further from it.
... even in C that stuff is resource intensive.
Although that is primarily the 'classic' idea of philosophy and I'm well aware of increasing fields related to computer science like information law (or whatever they call it) and AI. I became disheartened as I tried implementing some rudimentary NLP/AI programs
Is a merger of Philosophy, a discipline steeped in history and intelligent thought, and Computer Science, a discipline that looks to the future, the best of both worlds?
No offense but you just took two positive sentences about two arbitrary majors and tried to pull them together for reasons unknown to me. The same could probably be said about any two majors:
Is a merger of Home Economics, a discipline steeped in making home life better and easier, and Mathematics, a discipline of rigorous proofs, the best way to improve the common man's life?
Yeah, it's romantic. But aside from logic, predicate calculus and the philosophy of mathematics, could you help me out in how this is supposed to meld with my Java monkey job?
... where has a major application of Philosophy developed in Computer Science in the last 2.5 years?
Don't get me wrong, I love to read AI papers on arxiv and tinker with a local copy of Wikipedia at home but
does it matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
Computer Science needs to go. 95% of the students majoring in Computer Science should actually be majoring in Software Engineering.
It's a sad mistake of history than CompSci is the major most widely available in a world that needs software engineers, not more academics arguing about p=np.
There is nothing wrong with Computer Science, it's just being applied incorrectly in the education system today.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Writing as somebody who likes philosophy... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not sold on the ethics connection, either. Ethics is a very interesting philosophical field; but I'm not at all sure that it is relevant to the vast majority of situations where unethical behavior is a problem. Virtually nobody is dissuaded from bad behavior by the Kantian imperative or any other theoretical device, and virtually nobody falls into bad behavior because of ignorance of such a device. Ethics is a fascinating way to work on curious edge cases; but it doesn't have much to say about real world "ethical" problems, which are mostly about people doing things they know are bad, not doing things they know are good, or rationalizing things one way or the other. Psychology and social systems stuff are really what you want there.
Re:Logic is programming (Score:5, Insightful)
We usually call this notion the Curry Howard correspondence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry-Howard_correspondence [wikipedia.org]
It is an idea used a lot by programmers in languages like Haskell.
Re:Logic is programming (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering that much of philosophy involves establishing a framework for reality, it's interesting how we seem to have developed this corroborating mechanistic analogue for the logical principles established so long ago. What I find intriguing is how the drift in philosophy echoed George Boole and his joining of mathematics with stepwise logic, rather than the more difficult (yet apparently easier) inferential path followed by the classic philosophers.
Put another way, it's interesting how important the careful establishment of the question has become to determining the right answer. Validate the question first, then the answer follows more easily. Semantics are easier that way. So, now, we're developing a segment of the world's population who are being trained in logical -- and rational -- thinking. That, by itself, can only be good.
Re:I Think You're Reaching There (Score:1, Insightful)
Sometimes I like to think of roles [oreillynet.com] (or Smalltalk traits [unibe.ch]) as an exploration of Platonic ideals and Kantian noumena, in the idea that our means of interaction between objects depends solely on our understanding of their phenomena.
Re:Obviously! (Score:4, Insightful)
Computer Science is no exception.
Re:Logic is programming (Score:5, Insightful)
The best "science" course I ever had was a philosophy course on the philosophy of science...Never, ever had a foundational course in science that really hit the heart of the scientific method in the same way.
It's real easy to miss the forest for the trees. Having a good course on the why gives you an amazing depth of perception on the how.
Re:Everyone should study some philosophy (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to paint the world as black and white that's true.
Philosophy helps one to ask the right questions and have intelligent discussions on things like if a society actually benefits from a fraction of people who are "assholes."
Re:Zen and the Art Of Computer Programming (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, because a fuzzy blend of eastern thought and western existentialism is valuable for anyone.
Fine. Decent book. But it's got zip to do with CS, or even much with logic, and that's the exact sort of statement that lets demagogues dismiss philosophy as nothing but intellectual fluff.
Re:Depends on which branches you're talking about (Score:3, Insightful)
The connection is historical, and has a name: Kant. Until Kant, the analytic and critical philosophical traditions were the same. After Kant, the analytic tradition went one way, and through Hegel, what we call the continental tradition went the other way. At times (e.g., Wittgenstein, Searle, Heidegger via Dreyfus) there are good-will ambassadors sent from one camp to the other, but generally they are now different disciplines, with the continental tradition being more important to the social sciences, humanities, and arts and the analytic tradition speaking more to linguistics, mathematics, and computer science.
My personal belief is that if computer science is to thrive and grow, it will become more of a humanities-type field and less of a hard science. Not that the programming and math is going away: only that most of the hard theoretical problems are either in mathematics or in electrical engineering now (depending on what type of hard problem it is) while we are beginning to realize that computers are a very important communication and representational media, and that this aspect of them is what is probably going to dominate for the near future.
Re:I Think You're Reaching There (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you've got this a bit wrong. You're looking at the subject matter of philosophy and missing the bigger picture. As a philosophy graduate who works in IT, I can tell you that Philosophy may teach aspects like ethical theory and metaphysics, but the real utility is a greater understanding of how to learn and assimilate information. After several years of in depth philosophical study, you begin to learn that all information, regardless of subject matter, is similarly able to be processed. You learn to read more effectively, think more logically, and analyze data from multiple levels.
Really, philosophy puts you in a position to have sharply honed skills that can be utilized in any possible profession. If marketed correctly, if could mean the difference between your promotion over a coworker or even your ability to negotiate a better salary. Greater than that, also... what happens if you get tired of being a code monkey? What if one day you lose the passion you once had for the things you do on a daily basis? A strong philosophical background provides an excellent basis for a career move to nearly any field you want.
Re:Logic is programming (Score:4, Insightful)
It later developed into a fool blown science, because, well, there will always be people that study the tool instead of using it. Not that that's bad or anything
It's a banal and inapporpriate question. (Score:3, Insightful)
This question is a red herring, because by answering it the way it is written it allows us to avoid the question that is taken for granted: does philosophy and computer science have little to no overlap? You have to believe that both fields don't overlap if you want to start answering the post's question as it is written.
But consider just some of the branches and topics of philosophy: aesthetics, reality, truth, ethics(!), logic. I have yet to see anyone try and demonstrate that these topics have no relevance to certain fields. At bare minimum, the social nature of all knowledge implies that these topics will have relevance to your field, occupation, or program of study.
Furthermore, take just one branch of philosophy: ethics. Essentially asking the question, "how then shall we live together?", the only way you could prove that a topic under consideration had little relevance to ethics is if you could prove that the topic under consideration has nothing to do with how we live our lives. I have yet to see anyone attempt to prove this about any topic.
Maybe it was just a poorly worded question, and the poster was asking about ways to make explicit how deeply connected both fields are. I'm not certain. But it's troubling to see such a huge assumption about philosophy and computer science pop up here and have so many people agree to it without proof.
Re:Hasn't anybody read (Score:3, Insightful)
the predicate calculus, which is boring.
Speak for yourself! I love predicate calculus (which is probably why I also enjoy formal methods and specialise in system safety).
Yes, but formal logic is part of mathematics (Score:5, Insightful)
and it's quite different than logic studied in philosophy classes.
Re:Everyone should study some philosophy (Score:3, Insightful)
Russell's book is also wildly outdated and heavily biased in favour of his own ideas. It's simply not possible to gain anything other than a superficial understanding of the subject from a book like that.
When people say they are interested in philosophy, they often mean different things, since it is such a diverse subject that is only unified by its tools and methods.
People who are interested in philosophy are better off approaching it through the questions that interest them. For example, are the theories of Quantum mechanics properly translatable into ordinary natural languages, or can they only be expressed in mathematical terms? If so, what consequences does this have for ordinary language?
Thinking about questions like that will carry you much further into the subject than reading "History of Philosophy for Dummies".
Re:Everyone should study some philosophy (Score:3, Insightful)
that is only unified by its tools and methods.
Even that might be a stretch. In my experience methodological differences divide philosophers as much as they unite them via syllogistic reasoning. The philosopher that rejects metaphysics will reason much differently than those that don't. He will focus on linguistic analysis rather than the study of objects and properties. This is a pretty divisive methodological difference IMHO.
Re:Logic is programming (Score:4, Insightful)
personally, i think philosophy should be taught starting in high school or junior high. the sad fact of the matter is, most people never go to college, but almost anyone could benefit from a strong foundational knowledge of philosophy, including logic and ethics.
i mean, we teach economics, physics, chemistry, etc. in high school, so why not philosophy? at the very least high school students should be introduced to the rules of logic & dialectic and familiarize themselves with common informal fallacies. if a person cannot distinguish truth from fallacy, they are much easier to manipulate as they would be easily deceived by specious arguments. this is both dangerous and societally detrimental.
if more people understood the rules of the logic then we wouldn't have so many people falling for the blatant sophistry espoused by political pundits & demagogues who dominate the media. so there's definitely much benefit to be gained from teaching philosophical logic early on. aside from cutting down on irrational attitudes and behaviors, the analytical & problem-solving skills one develops by learning how to apply logic rigorously in all aspects of one's life can be invaluable life tools.
Re:Logic is programming (Score:4, Insightful)
Richard Feynman