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?"
Reading two and a half year old slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
While reading the two and a half year old Slashdot post
Get out much?
Logic is programming (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, a course in the philosophy department on logic got me into computers. Years later I took a programming course and discovered it was the same thing as symbolic logic, mostly. The rest is history. It made my career. :-)
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That's how I got my start as well. Symbolic logic is vastly more relevant to programming than most people realize.
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I am not in college now, but, if I were, I'd major in philosophy. See, I've been working in IT for 10 years now, can code in many languages, can sys admin, can pretty much do anything I need to do from a practical standpoint. The thing is, those skills are nearly worthless in a lot of small/medium IT departments. The skill that keeps me employed is my ability to solve problems, very quickly and without major fallout.
It keeps me employable even if I'm not the best programmer/sysadmin/etc the world has ever s
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.
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~Richard Feynman
Re:Logic is programming (Score:4, Insightful)
Richard Feynman
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: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.
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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 ca
Re:Logic is programming (Score:5, Informative)
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
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The basics of logic look like a tool, but if you study it at the graduate level, you quickly realize that it is a philosophical pursuit.
"If A then B" might sound like simple math, but that statement makes many substantial philosophical assumptions. What is A? What is B? Does A really cause B? Can anything be said to cause anything? And so on...
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Yes, but formal logic is part of mathematics (Score:5, Insightful)
and it's quite different than logic studied in philosophy classes.
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they tend to focus on different things (Score:4, Informative)
I'd say mathematical logic classes tend to be more detailed but less broad: they focus on the rigorous mathematical treatment of usually one or two relatively well-behaved logics, like propositional logic or first-order logic.
Philosophical logic classes, by contrast, study these logics in less depth, but put more emphasis on comparisons between logics, the relationship between logic and natural-language argument and thought (and science), and so on.
Which of these is watered down I suppose depends on your perspective. Introductory philosophical logic classes typically have much weaker treatment of issues such as decidability, model theory, interpretations, syntax vs. semantics, and so on. On the other hand, introductory mathematical logic classes typically have much weaker treatment of issues such as nonmonotonic logics, higher-order logics, autoepistemic logics, the relationship between logic and science/mathematics, the ontological commitments inherent in a choice of logic (if any), etc.
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it's both (Score:5, Informative)
Or, slightly more specifically, it depends on what parts of symbolic logic you focus on. Given a specific system of symbolic logic, working out its technical implications is yes, essentially mathematics or theoretical computer science. Using it to implement automated reasoners is artificial intelligence (a branch of computer science).
Designing logics can go either way, though. You could do it purely as a technical matter: you want a logic with a particular property, so you design one that has that property. Most logics are designed from a more philosophical perspective, though: logic basically as a way of formalizing statements and ways of reasoning about statements. From Aristotle through the middle ages people had catalogued valid and fallacious methods of reasoning; a system of logic encompasses a formalization of such a system. It also has ontological implications, depending on what you decide to make representable in the logic, and what you view as the implications of doing so. For example, W.V.O. Quine's works on logic, while they contain technical results as well, are mainly philosophical in nature. Bertrand Russell's research program in logic, while it contained a lot of technical results, was also primarily philosophical in nature.
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At first I was going succumb to your point and just call it pedantic--like, cut me some slack, dude. :-) In other words, yeah, I see your point. I was, as usual, moving too fast. But then I thought about those ghastly problems I remember writing on the chalkboard and how we got from premis to conclusion by following all these twisty turns: 'if A implies B and B implies the price of tea in China then what color was John's shoes--symbolically, I mean?' (with no GOTOs allowed) to get to a final answer--took up
Principa Cybernetica (Score:5, Informative)
This [vub.ac.be] is one of the first websites I discovered when I first started getting on the internet back in the early to mid 90s.
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Yes, it's one of the earliest (if not the earliest) -- but it's also one of the countless sites on computer ethics that doesn't deal with the number of unemployed people our profession creates.
Sure, it creates (or created) lots of jobs in IT, but there are lots of people for which IT is not a viable future - nor is nuclear physics, brain surgery, biochemistry, ...
These are very highly skilled jobs, and not suitable for everyone.
Somehow we should also put our mind to looking at the other side of the medal -
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Hmm - do you think it was CS driven advances (say, production automation; or the easy ability to offshore call-centres) that cost more jobs, or advances in other areas?
I would think that CS directly or indirectly cost more unskilled jobs than any other higher skilled area -- though, I'd love to be proven wrong. So, if you know another higher skilled area of jobs that contributed more to losses in the lower skilled work sector, please post here...
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.
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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
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."
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Wow. You come from a very unusual area, probably unlike 99% of this planet. So I'm curious, one of the "big picture" things, like the list that the GP mentions, is the concept of a Moral Wat. A standard topic in every first year philosophy course, as it is an easy way to introduce the v
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You need to study philosophy so you can understand why...
- fewer and fewer people want to pay for buggy software
- 10 smart guys in a meeting room can't agree on anything, even when they write it down
- 100 smart guys agree to work triple-time for 1.5 the salary for the next 8-12 months, while the senior executives work a little, get huge bonuses, and then send 75 of those jobs to Bangalore
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Graduates should also continue a lifetime of self-study.
That is a great idea, but most college grads crack less than one book a year. If more people would put down the mouse and the remote and read a &#$%%! book, our society would be much better off.
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I don't know how it is at most universities, but at the one I went to, for (nearly) any course under the 300 level that you were interested in but didn't need for graduation, you'd be better off reading one or two good books on the subject. It'd take less time, and you'd learn more, unless you're someone who has trouble learning from books, I guess.
For philosophy, I'd recommend Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. It's widely available, fairly cheap, thorough and a bit long but still small en
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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
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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.
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I'm just saying, if you're going to take one low-numbered intro class, you're probably better off reading a book or two, and I happen to think that Russell's is exceptionally approachable without dumbing down the material too much, and gives a good overview many major ideas that you're likely to see in other material outside the field of philosophy proper.
As for the biases: yeah, he's got them, most notably with Nietzsche. In that case, he flat-out says that he finds Nietzsche's philosophy and ethics "unsa
Hasn't anybody read (Score:4, Insightful)
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I read about half of it. Couldn't make it much further than that.
Read the dialogues from the rest of the book, though.
It's a great book.
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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).
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But you can get through it if you mind your P's and Q's.
...
I hate you.
Data Modelling (Score:3, Interesting)
Wittgenstein (Score:2, Interesting)
"1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things." --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
That's the best short description of relational modeling I've ever found, for somebody used to object-oriented modeling. Basically, it's a change of ontology: the OO modeler tends to think of the world as being made up of things, each of which has some repertoire of properties; the world is a big set of things, related by a few universal laws. The relational modeler, on the other hand, conceives
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Your wallet is an object owned by you for storage of a variable called money. Your boss has a relationship to you as your superior and the location you work is merely a branch of the parent company (even if branch instance is only 1). etc etc Data Modelling can show you how all real life situations can be turned into objects and relationships and can be very u
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
more in research than in development (Score:5, Informative)
It's particularly relevant in areas of CS research with significant philosophical implications, like AI. In some cases knowing relevant philosophical problems can point out likely technical problems and potential approaches to solving them.
For example, machine learning repeatedly bangs its head against the age-old philosophical problem of induction, and in my view (as an AI academic), the people who know about that and the relevant literature are more likely to make non-naive technical contributions.
Reinforcement learning (a specific branch dealing with learning how to act in an environment) bangs its head against issues like the relationship between something we might call "the real world", the data from your senses, and how to infer between them. Specific technical proposals have largely recapitulated some of the philosophical debate: for example, there was a semi-recent and somewhat influential proposal to replace a priori "states", which represent a view of the "real" states in an environment, with phenomenological state, constructed on the fly from sequences of sensor values clustered based on their ability to predict future sensor values (Predictive State Representations, or PSRs). This is essentially recapitulating the empiricists' "sense-data" view of the early 20th century, which they proposed as a replacement for metaphysical ontologies of the world.
Re:I Think You're Reaching There (Score:4, Interesting)
But those are all general skills; my knowledge of philosophical theories or history or personalities are, frankly, never a part of my work life.
You could say the same thing about physics. I use neither theories of gravity and electromagnetism nor knowledge of famous physicists as part of my daily programming. But in the process of learning those things, I learned valuable lessons about experimentation and scientific thinking. Physics problems are well suited to the scientific method, philosophy problems are well suited to philosophical methods (well, sometimes).
Writing computer programs and writing analytical philosophy papers are more or less the same thing except computer programs are easier to test and may have better documented assumptions (APIs).
There are also striking personality correlations between computer scientists and philosophers. So if a CS major takes some philosophy courses, he may make some interesting new friends. But there's certainly no reason to merge the departments (unless they're also joined with the math department).
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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
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Like many others here, it was logic that led me to CS. My degree is in philosophy, but my career is in software development. So maybe I'm a bit biased.
I can't really point to applications in the last 2.5 years, but I think you're overstating the case. I'm quite familiar with work done by people here [utexas.edu] (Nick Asher, mentioned on that page, was chair of UT's philosophy dept. for some time). Paul and Patricia Churchland have done a great deal to bring the philosophy of mind in line with contemporary scientific th
I for one... (Score:3, Funny)
...wonder whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of welcoming our new AI overlords or not; that is the question.
Obviously! (Score:2, Troll)
Philosophy is indispensible to all science. Even though calling computing a science is a tad of a stretch, the need for philosophy still applies. Perhaps even more so.
Re:Obviously! (Score:4, Insightful)
Computer Science is no exception.
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It isn't computing that is the science of computer science programs. It's the purpose of (proper) computer science programs to apply science to the realm of computing.
Yes, most computer science programs should be renamed software engineering, or even "how to write code". However, there are a lot of programs that still delve into the science of computing - those researching quantum computing, for example.
No (Score:2, Funny)
Hint for those of you not forced to study such things while you were taking CS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes [wikipedia.org]
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I wasn't forced to study such things, but as I get older, I can feel my general curiosity pulling me toward a basic look at philosophy.
I'm not so much interested in questions like "What is reality?" -- at least not at this time -- but more practical philosophy, if you will, questions like "Are all viewpoints equally valid?"
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The thing, and you talked about this in your post, that pisses me off most is the people who decide that all philosophy is about long dead philosophers, and fuzzy-headed problems without real solutions. The cogito is shit. It's a linguistic oddity, and it has nothing to do with the world.
I majored in philosophy, and the logic classes I had were brain-crushingly difficult. The theory classes I had were very heavy on the theory of cognition, perception, semantics. I took some ethics (because it interested me)
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Cogito.Ergo.Sum()
Cogito? I thought the whole porcelain/plumbing thing went out of fashion and everyone used straight git. And whenever you use git (which you do if you use the cogito frontend), there's of course a sha1sum.
So indeed Descartes was right: Cogito implies sum; if you use cogito, there's a sum. It's all adding up now...
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)
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May I add:
What is science, if not applied philosophy?
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What I'm trying to say without sounding too self-absorbed is that philosophy makes everything better!
and I refute it thus: If philosophy makes everything better then where are the philosopher kings [wikipedia.org] that Plato spoke of and if they are not here yet then how have things gotten any better since the time of Plato?
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but we do ostensibly select our best and brightest to "rule."
Then how was Bush the younger ever selected to "rule"?
You're going to have to be more specific here.
Lets go with your technology example, on the one hand you believe that it has made things better but some things, probably connected with technology, are arguably still worse or have been made worse. If philosophy is a necessary, although perhaps not a sufficient, condition for modern technology AND modern technology does not always make things better, even in the aggregate, then how can philosophy always make everything better?
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If philosophy makes everything better then where are the philosopher kings [wikipedia.org] that Plato spoke of and if they are not here yet then how have things gotten any better since the time of Plato?
Has the thing that makes us human has gotten any better, can it ?
A leader cant make his followers "better", he can show them a path of self improvement.
But if you are just being superficial, then yes. Im sure you have lots of stuff, and having lots of stuff makes you better than people in Plato's time....
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With the notable exception of advanced degrees at Harvard, most fields of study terminate at a "Doctor of Philosophy" degree for this very reason.
Um, I think you will find that lots of universities around the world have higher doctorates, not just Harvard. *All* the Australian universities I attended or have even looked at - major and regional - had PhDs but also had the higher degrees of DLitt, DSc, etc which are only awarded to scholars with extensive and outstanding research publications in their field.
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Every field of study... that is, every single field of study... was once a branch of philosophy, or a branch off a branch of philosophy, et cetera.
Actually-- this is untrue. There are plenty of fields whose genesis was in practice, and the refinement of that practice became the study, including many scientific fields. Metallurgy, engineering, chemistry, to name a few. To use [abused] philosophical terminology: certain things cannot be known a priori, therefore knowledge of them must be gained through experience. Modern scientific thought borrows Hegel's dialectic ("thesis, antithesis, synthesis") from philosophy, but it is not solely derived from
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Isn't this backwards? (Score:3, Interesting)
it occurred to me that over these past few years Philosophy has a more prominent role in Computer Science then ever before
Maybe computers have a more prominent role in philosophy than ever before. Not in the physical sense of typing up long winded papers, but in the sense of creating models to simulate ... stuff.
Just asking.
Writing as somebody who likes philosophy... (Score:2, Insightful)
I
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Say rather that all mathematics stems from philosophy and you'll be more correct. The foundation of modern mathematical thought was a philosophical work called the Principia Mathematica [wikipedia.org]. Deductive logic is pretty much the foundation of all programming languages, its relevant to chip architecture, everything.
As far as ethics go, I'm more ambivalent. There is no great ethical theory out there these days, it's just varying forms of crappy, intellectually bankrupt relativism. Kant may have had his problems, b
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Say rather that all mathematics stems from philosophy and you'll be more correct.
More correct could still be a far cry from correct.
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Um, no, not really. Rather, foundationalist philosophers of mathematics, and a few philosophically oriented mathematicians used to claim that mathematics was founded on logic and/or set theory. There were always philosophers who disagreed with the whole foundationalist project for mathematics, and over time those folks have gotten more and more influential.
Computer science has given a hell of a boost
ignorance is bliss (Score:4, Informative)
There is a lot in computer science that has long ago been worked out in philosophy, but for which most computer scientists have but a fuzzy grasp.
Computer Science operates under certain philosophical assumptions which have consequences -- but if you don't even know that you're operating under a DUALISTIC ASSUMPTIONS -- you will not be able to deal with those.
For example, Cognitive Scientists are often are not very precise in their use of the words 'knowledge' and 'understanding', as John Searle so brilliantly explains:
(Exerpted from 'Minds Brains and Programs')
"First I want to block some common misunderstandings about 'understanding': in many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word "understanding." My critics point out that there are many different degrees of understanding; that "understanding" is not a simple two-place predicate; that there are even different kinds and levels of understanding, and often the law of excluded middle doesn-t even apply in a straightforward way to statements of the form "x understands y; that in many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on. To all of these points I want to say: of course, of course. But they have nothing to do with the points at issue. There are clear cases in which "understanding' literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument 2 I understand stories in English; to a lesser degree I can understand stories in French; to a still lesser degree, stories in German; and in Chinese, not at all. My car and my adding machine, on the other hand, understand nothing: they are not in that line of business. We often attribute "under standing" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions. We say, "The door knows when to open because of its photoelectric cell," "The adding machine knows how) (understands how to, is able) to do addition and subtraction but not division," and "The thermostat perceives chances in the temperature."
The reason we make these attributions is quite interesting, and it has to do with the fact that in artifacts we extend our own intentionality;3 our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples. The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English. If the sense in which Schank's programmed computers understand stories is supposed to be the metaphorical sense in which the door understands, and not the sense in which I understand English, the issue would not be worth discussing. But Newell and Simon (1963) write that the kind of cognition they claim for computers is exactly the same as for human beings. I like the straightforwardness of this claim, and it is the sort of claim I will be considering. I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing. The computer understanding is not just (like my understanding of German) partial or incomplete; it is zero.
[This has certain consequences...]
IN MUCH OF AI THERE IS A RESIDUAL BEHAVIOURISM OR OPERATIONALISM. Since appropriately programmed computers can have input-output patterns similar to those of human beings, we are tempted to postulate mental states in the computer similar to human mental states. But once we see that it is both conceptually and empirically possible for a system to have human capacities in some realm without having any intentionality at all, we should be able to overcome this impulse. My desk adding machine has calculating capacities, but no intentionality, and in this paper I have tried to show that a system could have input and output capabilities that duplicated those
Bah humbug... (Score:3, Interesting)
John Searle is rubbish. His argument simply isn't cogent. Lets look at it this way. Obviously your brain has a vast array of capabilities, it is highly complex. Furthermore it performs a function (assisting your biological survival and reproduction) which is an ongoing constant task, it never ends, and it does not break down into any one closed set of sub goals.
Now, lets consider your calculator. It is quite simple and performs only a few specific functions. Furthermore its function is quite limited, it per
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Let me summarize the paper.
In the first section: If somebody can write a strong AI program, I can construct a system of me, an instruction book, and some pieces of paper such that I can take in sentences in Chinese, manipulate them, and put out sentences in Chinese. This is the "Chinese Room". I certainly don't understand Chinese, the pieces of paper don't, and the instruction book doesn't. Therefore, since I don't know how to spell "emergnet porperties", the Chinese Room cannot understand.
In follow
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Yeah, you're saying the same kind of stuff I was saying in another p [slashdot.org]
I did it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm almost 5 years out of school now and got degrees in both CS and Philosophy. In my humble opinion, there's a lot of intersection between the two, especially in regard to philosophy of the mind, but the really interesting part, I think, is how it helps me in my day to day work.
No, I'm not discussing the Critique of Pure Reason, espousing empiricism, or wondering if I really am just dreaming.
What I learned from my other major was discursive thinking: dissecting an idea to see what it means and what its ramifications are and how to deal with having more than one way to do it (TM) by choosing the best one.
Philosophy, for me, was all about discussion, so I'd had years of practice putting ideas up on the white board, understanding them, and maybe shooting them down years before I ever joined my first programming team.
(That, and being able to write incomprehensible comments vis a vis the English challenged folk with whom I sometimes work;))
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While I didn't get the double major, I spent almost as much time in philosophy classes as in CS classes. I found it to be a different kind of thinking that was almost relaxing compared to a long day over a hot keyboard debugging a parser. Not, as my family insisted, because I like to argue. I agree completely with it being about discussion, and how to defend one's ideas without resorting to "Oh, yeah?", and "Sez you!"
Oh, and getting to recite from memory the Professor of Logic from The Album of The Soundtra
Backwards (Score:3, Interesting)
After 25 years ... No. (Score:2, Interesting)
In 1983, as an undergraduate, I started at DUKE on a pair of B.S degrees in Psychology (emphasis on Human Learning) and Computer Science but later expanded my undergraduate scope to include a Philosophy degree. I was durn early in crossing these disciplines and still remember how little they used to talk to one another (during the late 80s and into the early 90s it was frustrating and amusing to watch the C.S. AI researchers painfully re-discover stuff that Psychologists had known for decades).
After so man
Depends on which branches you're talking about (Score:3, Informative)
There's a lot of branches to philosophy, most are basically entire disciplines unto themselves. I think in terms of logic and ethics, yes there's some overlap -- as those are two branches in the field.
But when talking about areas like phenomenology, epistemology & cosmology I don't see any real connection, or any kind of overlap (without really forcing it). Not that it's a bad thing -- it's just an apples and oranges kind of thing.
Ethics is relevant anywhere imo, not only CS and certainly in the business world it's valuable. I would say the one place where philosophy and CS overlap the closest is in Logic, for pretty obvious reasons.
But, there's simply too many areas of study in philosophy for the disciplines to merge entirely
Re: (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, hum
Re: (Score:2)
But when talking about areas like phenomenology, epistemology & cosmology I don't see any real connection, or any kind of overlap (without really forcing it). Not that it's a bad thing -- it's just an apples and oranges kind of thing.
Epistemology does have some relevance in the AI field.
Finally a use for my CS Applied Philosophy degree! (Score:2)
Bryyo (Score:2)
Philosophy? What about religion (Score:2, Funny)
We've had that in IT for awhile now. Just go to your UNIX sysadmin and start reading the features list for Windows Vista-- Instant holy war. So philosophy in IT would actually be an improvement. ^_^ (grinning, ducking, running)
Philosophy: Logic (Score:2)
When I was in college (Computer Engineering), I needed 3 courses to finish my humanties electives.
I took Logic, Advanced Logic, and Philosophy and Logic. All thru the Philosophy Dept. They were cross-listed using Math and Computer Science, too.
But as a Philosophy course, well, you get my drift!
Yes! The philosophy of information! (Score:3, Interesting)
Are computer science and philosophy related? Yes! I have BA in philosophy, and I focused on cognitive science and artificial intelligence, where the two meet head to head. Computer science needs philosophy in order to help evaluate the status of machines in terms of whether or not they have consciousness. And philosophy needs computer science to help answer open questions in the philosophy of mind.
Also, the two have a mutual interest in the study of information--what is it, how do you use it efficiently, how do you organize it, how do you process it, etc. If you have any interest in it, you should definitely check out Luciano Floridi [philosophy...mation.net]--he's part of/started a movement he calls The Philosophy of Information [blackwellpublishing.com] that encompasses but AI and the philosophy of computing in general, including questions in ethics.
Currently I'm taking courses in computer science (and I work in IT), and I hope to start grad school in cognitive science next year. So yes, for me philosophy and computer science are intimately entwined.
Minds and Computers (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
A good book to read. (Score:2)
Not really convinced... (Score:2)
Philosophy as others have remarked is a pretty broad subject. Some things like symbolic logic are very similar to the methods used in Computer Science which have a lot to do with software development and problem solving (although we are definitely living in the age where formal views of program correctness are not the norm).
Other things about philosophy like "intentionality" as a field of study are farther off, perhaps to the point of inconsequential.
That said much of the posting is full of things you find
Well kept secret that epistemologists talk dirty (Score:2)
Any academic discipline that has technical terms like "raw feelies" can't be all bad.
Sure, why not. Clear thinking will be at a premium in unraveling the mechanisms of cognition. And in AI, some people (COUGH, Kurzweil) seem to talk like sentience will spontaneously emerge if you can fill a large enough barrel with nanobots. More in the Hofstadter camp myself that building a mind is going to be a long slog through thick terrain.
Philosophy has been dead for 200 years (Score:2)
After the very early enlightenment (late 1700s - early 1800s), philosophy was put to use to reconcile reason with religion and despotism (Hegel, Kant) or to explain why the two could not be reconciled (Nietzsche). Finally the quest ended in defeat and nihilism with the existentialists during the mid 20th century.
This of course has nothing to do with computer science.
There are some ignored philosophers who might tangentially be of interest to computer science like some of Von Mises's technical methodologica
Cf: Australian Computer Society's Code of Ethics (Score:2)
If the following link doesn't get you there, just access the organization's home page & search for "Code of Ethics"...
http://acs.org.au/index.cfm?action=show&conID=coe [acs.org.au]
I'd be interested in other IT (or Engineering) societies' Codes of Ethics (or similar)...
Kindly post links in a reply to this post, thanks.
Or the WORST of both worlds (Score:2)
About now, I am thinking the latter.
Re: (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: (Score:2)
Philosophers realized this a long time ago. Much of what is called modern "analytic" philosophy is based on the idea you just expressed: that philosophical problems often arise through an inadequate grasp of logic or language.