Philosophy and Computer Science Revisited

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?"

Comments

Principa Cybernetica

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

This is one of the first websites I discovered when I first started getting on the internet back in the early to mid 90s.

Re:Logic is programming

[Hellcom]

What are you talking about? Logic is a branch of philosophy, and has been for millenniums and formally founded by Plato and Aristotle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logic

it's both

[Trepidity]

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.

more in research than in development

[Trepidity]

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.