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Does Philosophy Have a Role in Computer Science?
Johannes Climacus asks: "It would seem to me that philosophical works of philosophers such as Aristotle, Leibniz, Frege, Russell, and Tarski could play a central role in a Computer Science curriculum, as they form a mathematical basis of modern CS and Math. Ethicists such as Plato, Kant, Hegel, Mill, and Heidegger might also play a normative role in Computer Ethics and technology in general. However, I haven't seen any philosophical discussion in any of my theoretical computer science courses besides some simple logic. Is it the same elsewhere? How often do philosophical concerns play into Computer Science education as a whole? What role does (or could) philosophy have in Computer Science or Information Technology?"
go read a biography or two of alan turing.
then you will have your answer.
While a class on CS and philosophy would certainly be appreciated, it is probably a rare find. So why not do what a lot of others have done and just roll your own so to speak. Take classes outside of CS(which is something that could not hurt anyway) and use them how you see fit. I think you can even get it to count for credit if that is what you are worried about. I had to take 6 credits outside of CS on an *approved list* myself, and it seems that most advisors seem pretty flexible and as long as you can make a compelling case for it(and of course as long as you are not flunking your other courses).
Have fun and remember, study as many topics as you can while you are in college. You will probably be doing CS stuff for the rest of your life, but you may only be able to easily take a class on film theory or comparative literature while you are an undergrad...
Monstar L
From Wikipedia:
Philosophy is a lot more logical than most people would assume at first glance.
A couple of years ago this thesis was published at the CompSci department in Lund. It's 200 pages about component-oriented programming, segueing into almost a thousand pages about the moral and ethical ramification on computation in general. He did pass, but only just; many people thought it really was two theses in one, and that the philosophical part really should have been presented at the philosophy department, not in computer science.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
This is what The Man said about philosophy:
"Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself."
I thought modern philosophy was ephermeral, mindless crap.
Surely you're thinking of deconstructionism and all the other garbage that gets pushed onto poor, unsuspecting lovers of the English language.
Philosophy deals mostly with logic. I wish more were taught in CS courses, if only to engender more rigorous thinking.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
I think you are a little unfair to old Leibniz.
A little further down the article Leibniz is credited along with Newton with inventing infinitesimal calculus. He was actually a prodigious mathematician that formalized many of the concepts in calculus and other branches of mathematics.
More closely related to the topic Leibniz also credited himself with "discovering" the binary number system. Used in *cough* all digital electronics today. He even built a binary arithmetic machine some 150 years before Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.
He also made great contributions to the field of library science. His early proposals, though unsuccessful, predated similar institutions like the Library of Congress by hundreds of years.
To say nothing about his contributions to science, he was widely considered an all around genius. He has written on so many subjects in such breadth and depth most professional historians could not spend a lifetime and take them all in.
So yes, thanks to Voltaire and his book Candide, Leibniz will be remembered as the butt of the joke in a satirical novella. At least outside of mathemeticians who only know Leibniz as the guy that has college level math classes named after him. It is a good thing Leibniz lives in the best of all worlds. I'd hate to see what it could have been like.
In all seriousness, Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" defense of God actually works quite well as a variation of Kirkegaard's existential philosophy. Although atheists also agree with Kirkegaard's philosophy as it does not apply exclusively to God fearing individuals.
What is objective knowledge for a given science? How do you demarcate what is a meaningful statement in computer science and what is meaningful in biology? How do you allow knowledge from one field to be objectively considered by another field with a different domain? These are meaningful questions in the domain of philosophy. All objective knowledge relies on logic, Gödel and Tarski showed us that while we can find truth in a domain, we can never be certain that the truth we have found will not be falsified later. There is no certainty to objective knowledge, no justification. At best, we can determine meaningfulness and test meaningful statements for falsity content. That was the innovation of Popper and the Critical Rationalists.
The goal of philosophy is methodological correctness, logic is at the heart of philosophy because that's how we describe method. Philosophy can only explore what the limits of lawfulness and order are. Without the ability to demarcate meaning, we cannot determine order. Why we seek lawfulness and order is a metaphysical question, it cannot be answered by philosophy, thus making philosophy incomplete and paying the price for objectivity.
Since computers are all systems of logic, we can use philosophy to determine what each system's limitations are and how differing systems can interact. Take the theoretical in computer science, how did we develop quantum computing? How will we integrate it into the rest of our systems? As we search for innovative ways to look for solutions to these questions, philosophy guides us, by maintaining methodological correctness, forcing us to maintain the integrity of the identity we have chosen.
Ethics is not philosophy. It is the application of objectivity to another set of goals, a different domain. If ethics is the domain of how to best get along with our neighbors and avoid creating unnecessary confrontation, then we can apply methodology to determine which statements are meaningful within this domain. For instance, Richard Stallman is a computer ethicist. His goal is to provide a particular ethical view of how we should integrate computer systems into our lives. Some statements are meaningful to these goals and others are not. Out of the meaningful statements, I can test which are most efficient at reaching specific goals, such as those of the FSF. I may not agree with those goals, I may oppose those goals, but since Stallman and the FSF have stated what their goals are, I can properly scope a domain. Once I understand the domain, I can test proposals and conjectures to determine which are most efficient towards reaching those goals. This is how objective knowledge grows, our motivation is always metaphysical. We cannot rationalize or justify inspiration. By understanding this, by enforcing methodological separation, we can concentrate on growing objective knowledge about our metaphysical goals. There is no natural imperative to understand the quantum structure of matter or to understand biological systems. We simply find these things useful, fulfilling.
If it is philosophy that you want to study, then study Critical Rationalism. The works of Popper, Bartley and Miller should keep you busy for a while and give you a thorough tour of just about everybody, as they've managed to falsify quite a few names in the summary. If it is ethics you are interested in, I can really only recommend who to avoid. Those who hide from criticism are unethical. Plato and Hegel are primarily useless. Both hid their ideas from criticism, attempting to fool the reader into prematurely aborting their attempt to rationalize their proposals. Plato taught 9 tyrants, Hegel was courtier to his own and the father of the Nazi lies. I would also avoid the spawn of these liars, Leo Strauss, Barth and Schaeffer. All of these have either embraced the Noble Lie or Nihilism. Either path is a cover from criticism; nihilism absurdly denies the capabilities of criticism, while the Noble Lie invokes paradox of the liar. One can never determine when a liar is inserting chaos into order to avoid criticism. Integrity is indispensable.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Saul Kripke who is a logician and a philosopher made major discoveries in Modal Logic which is actively being researched by computer scientists. But Kripke also did important work derived from his work in modal logic which was philosophical in nature. Such as philosophy of mind, metaphysics of necessity and an argument against private language (Kripkenstein).
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Leibniz really was the first to set off down the road to formal symbolic logic and reasoning as computation. Understanding some of his philosophy from the standpoint of the historical development of formal logic and computation is certainly within the purview of a CS based philosphy course. You could also throw in George Boole and Augustus DeMorgan who took the next important steps to developing, in Boole's words "the laws of thought".
Frege is certainly important in philosophy of mathematics with the first serious attempts to completely rigorously ground mathematics as logic. I'm less clear on exactly how well his work fits in to a CS philosophy course, though certainly he is of importance in the general development of formal logic.
Russell is the founder of type theory, which I'm sure anyone who has done much programming at all has made significant use of. At the time Russell developed it type theory was somewhat of a position he'd been forced into to escape various logical paradoxes in the foundations of mathematics. With the advent of computers however type theory saw a resurgence: types, and type signatures for functions, and a theory of types in general, suddenly seemd quite natural. Indeed type theory has become an important field in CS and programming language research. On that front it would probably be worth including Per Martin Löf and intuitionistic type theory, which is a more modern type theory better suited to the CS perspective than Russell's original work.
Tarski, notoriety of the Banach-Tarski paradox aside, is best known for a lot of remarkable work in logic, including his theorem regarding the indefinability of truth within formal systems, closely related to Gödel's incompleteness theorems. He also developed the bulk of model theory which is now very important in CS fields such as algebraic specification. Certainly including Tarski in a CS course would not go astray.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Philosophy is the aggregation, study, refinement and analysis of knowledge as a whole. The word itself means "the love of knowledge." If you think that has no impact on the real world, I feel very sad for you.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
That's simply incorrect. The literal translation of the Greek Sophos (Slashdot doesn't allow greek, but put Σοφος in your browser) is able, skilled or clever, and was applied as a title to those with the training to read the future from objects, as opposed to the innate ability. The word is in specific opposition to the modern term "wisdom." There isn't a word in ancient Greek for Wisdom, as they seperate between scholarly-attained internal wisdom and naturally-attained internal wisdom as two distinct topics. In Greek, scholarly wisdom is called skholastikos, and innate wisdom is referred to with the now largely forgotten word bleptor (which has largely been replaced by the Latin "vidensi" whence we retain "evident.")
A philosopher is a lover of knowlege, skill, ability, and cleverness, not a lover of wisdom, experience, or history. The word you're looking for is the extinct term "philobleptorist," which you can see in several contemporary references to Greek great minds, particularly Herotodeus, Aristotle, Anaximander, Democritus, Protagoras and so on; it's also occasionally used in the proto-Renaissance during the "omg Latin = smart" phase, and so you see it bandied about for people like Bacon, Newton and Galileo often.
By example, consider Mike Michaelmiker from WZZZ TV, John Brown from the Brown Family Farm and The Great Mage Darkcloud from Avalon. All three people are able to read the weather. Mike uses doppler radar. John uses what farmers have figured out over the last few thousand years. Darkcloud summons a demon and binds it to just go look at the future.
Mike Michaelmiker is a philosopher of weather. He understands how weather works. He understands why a tornado happens, and can evaluate data to estimate the likely upcoming weather patterns. With sufficient tools, his predictions are highly accurate in the near future. Mike doesn't need significant historical data for the local terrain; a map, some hardware and a few hours are sufficient for him to get up and going. However, without tools he cannot function.
John Brown is a philoblapterer of weather. He is aware of the historic trends for weather in the area. He knows dozens of signals from the natural world - if the air smells like metal, then an electrical storm is likely; if the air feels wet and drops rapidly in temperature, then rain is likely; if the wind seems faster at the ground than ten feet up, then local weather is about to turn from cloudy to clear. He doesn't know that the metallic smell is loose ozone from electrical interactions in the clouds, or so on; he just knows that that smell is an indicator of a well known process. With a few weeks to get a sense of the pattern and provided that his knowledge is locationally appropriate, his predictions are also highly accurate, but for completely different reasons. John is only effective in terrain he knows the history of, because even similar terrain can have radically different weather contexts, but needs no real tools other than some time.
Darkcloud is meteonephelamancia, and lord only knows how he works. The point was to distinguish between academics and learned innate knowledge. The Greeks believed that there was a block of knowledge waiting to be unlocked piecemeal inside each of us, and went as far as to distinguish that from scholastic information right in the language. Sophos is clearly knowledge of skill, not innate wisdom, by the very nature of the Greek lexicon.
The counterpart by scholarly skill is an academician; it was common but not required for a philosopher to be an academician. Counterexamples, however, include Pythagoras, who never attended a day of school in his life and proudly attested to that (people who call the Akousmatos a school are mistaken; it was a think-tank and a borderline cult. People went there to work, not to learn.) Pythagoras is remembered among other things as a great Philosopher, but it would be a mistake to call him an academic. Granted
StoneCypher is Full of BS