My first language was FOCAL, and BASIC came as a huge relief. Since then I've worked in Ada, C, C#, C++, Forth, FORTRAN, Modula2, Pascal, Python and VBA (not in that order). All except FORTRAN and VBA came as a huge relief from BASIC, but I can't help wondering whether that early BASIC experience is why I never got on with LISP, Haskell, Scheme, OCAML, Prolog etc, all of which I've dabbled in.
Personally I think they made a mistake in that regard, and should have outright prohibited a mix of tabs and spaces for indentation within a single file. In practice, though, it's not a big deal - everyone sane just uses spaces anyway, and most (all?) Python IDEs are configured that way out of the box. There's simply no way you can easily insert a tab in the middle of the code there.
And Python (optionally) warns you if you mix them anyway. Just teach that as a mandatory option.
Yeah, ideologically Python is all wrong and should be terrible. Trouble is, when you actually come to use it, it's great. So religiously you're right, scientifically the post you replied to is right. Evidence beats dogma.
From the article, there's just under 60,000 cameras now.
That's not a reliable figure, though. There is no official figures for the number of CCTVs in use in the UK, and some very dodgy statistics have a very long life. The figure of 60000 comes from a campaign group opposed to CCTV so it is likely to err on the high side.
There was also the argument that he had already been punished for his crimes through the justice system, and it would have been unjust to subject him to a further punishment.
I'm not claiming that solipsism is a useful way of life (although I think some forms of it are, and I do live like that). I'm claiming that the rejection of solipsism shows that there is a metaphysical underpinning of science. Either scientists reject solipsism outright, which is a metaphysical move, or they accept that solipsism might be right, in which case science can be an excellent pragmatic program (which is what I believe it to be) but loses any claim to being a definite route to truth and itself becomes metaphysical.
It is an answer to the question of how to ask questions. And Popper's argument on metaphysics is quite involved (he argues that the boundary between science and metaphysics is actually a social convention), but the simplest example is the question of how science avoids solipsism.
It might be an interesting approach, in that it could be fun to do and you could well get an article out of it for one of the popular philosophy magazines. But I suspect that you won't find any logical inconsistencies in his "assumptive dichotomy" but won't have vindicated Sartre because an argument being valid doesn't mean that it's sound.
Postmodern philosophy is not a single unified system of thought -- it would be more accurate to speak of postmodern philosophies. Remember that Popper was a postmodern philosopher, so the current understanding of science is based on postmodern philosophy (or rather, on a postmodern philosophy). But yes, some postmodern philosophies question the existence of universal answers (more likely universal certainties, though, which is a different matter). How is that incompatible with the development of technology, which surely only reasonable confidence (not certainty) that something will work for the foreseeable future in reachable space (not universally). Oh, and if your "universal" related to the subjectivity issue, that's covered by the "reasonable confidence".
Yes, there's almost certainly some bad philosophy in postmodernism, just as there's almost certainly some incorrect science that is currently accepted. Postmodernism in philosophy is a set of attempts to correct deficiencies that were identified in modernist philosophy, just as current science contains lots of corrections to deficiencies that were identified in previous scientific models of the world. In both cases, the corrections will have their own deficiencies, which it's the job of the discipline to find and try to correct. And then in both disciplines you get the cranks and crackpots.
It depends on the philosophical argument being made. If they assume certain object relationships cannot exist, and one can show how those relationships are possible in compilable code, odd as it sounds, it explodes the argument.
It doesn't sound odd at all, and I said explicitly that such was the case in which that approach works (my "job done" comment).
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre assumes there are only two types of objects: beings-in-themselves - things like rocks and trees - and beings-for-themselves... conscious entities, which essentially need other objects to think about in order to create themselves out of nothingness, recognize nothingness, and rely on other beings-for-themselves to establish identity. If you look at it from the point of view of a computer scientist, it takes on a really quite implementable model, which you can then discuss concretely without the froofery and meaninglessness of philosophical debate that so turned Wittgenstein off on the field.
If you look at it from a CS perspective (or even a mathematical perspective) then all Sartre has done is partition all entities into two sets, those that "need other objects to think about in order to create themselves out of nothingness, recognize nothingness, and rely on other beings-for-themselves to establish identity" and those that don't. Fine. I don't see how any amount of CS can determine whether the world can necessarily be divided into discrete entities at a level at which those properties apply, whether all entities can unambiguously be assigned to one or other set, or whether both of those sets are necessarily non-empty. If you manage to resolve the first two in the affirmative (quite a philosophical achievement!) and then manage to find at least one member of each set then you have solved the problem. But if you don't manage to find any members for one of the sets (and the non-dasein set requires that you construct a conscious entity -- quite a CS achievement!) then the problem remains open.
Scientists do not treat science as a religion. A religion takes a fixed viewpoint and defends it. Science uses evidence to search for what is.
I suggest you check out Scientism and consider how (or whether) science can be used to support or refute its claims. And philosophy does provide answers. I've already cited Popper, who provided the concept of falsifiability as an answer to the problem of scientific induction faced by the positivists. He also answered the question of whether science can be completely independent of metaphysics (in the negative -- it can't). Perhaps you think that because it doesn't provide scientific answers to scientific questions it doesn't provide any answers to any questions?
Science, by definition, changes it's viewpoint when evidence shows the original viewpoint is false/unfounded. Religion, by definition, has a set of unchanging doctrines. There is no comparison between the two.
As for philosophy. Philosophy can only teach us whether a question we ask is valid or not and if it is not, how to re-frame it. It cannot and does not provide answers to questions.
That's getting closer. Actually, philosophy gives answers too, but usually a range of answers (along with the strengths and weaknesses of each answer) and Math, Logic, Physics, Sociology choose the ones that are most useful to that particular discipline and then uses those to answer a whole new set of questions. For example, philosophy asks the question "how can we know a statement is true?" One of the answers it gives is the scientific method, and scientists use that to answer questions about the universe. Another answer it gives to the same question is formal logic, and mathematicians use that to answer questions about mathematical hypotheses. Yet another answer they give is that we might never be able to absolutely know anything, which the rest of the world uses to keep a humility check on scientists and mathematicians.
If science has the most scrutiny, it's only because philosophy scrutinises it. Unfortunately, many scientists reject that scrutiny, thinking (mistakenly) that science is self-contained, with nothing to learn from other disciplines. The whole thing you call science is what it is now because philosophers have challenged its past assumptions (such as Popper's challenging the positivists and introducing the notion of falsifiability). That process continues, but too many scientists treat science pretty much as a religion, and are threatened by anything that challenges what they believe about it.
As for "if one philosopher makes a mistake in a leap of logic, because they are of a particular viewpoint to start with, it is fairly likely another will do the same. No-one can actually test it", that pretty much ignores a huge part of what philosophy is. Philosophy actively searches for those unstated viewpoints and challenges them. To say that "nobody can actually test it" is plainly false because they do, routinely.
No, that's a confusion of levels. Remember, the question is "what is a better world". The question of what "works" only makes sense after you have decided what you want to achieve.
Missing these kinds of little details is why I have very little respect of philosophers.
They don't "miss" those details, they're not in scope.
As far as I can tell, most of them chose their field because it doesn't punish sloppy work.
Philosophy does punish sloppy work. relentlessly. Philosophical work is subject to more scrutiny and criticism than any discipline I know of, and that includes pure maths.
And then there's idiocy like the Chinese Room, which assumes that a system cannot have properties its components don't have, yet hasn't been laughed out like it should had been.
Laughing something out doesn't work in philosophy. Unlike whatever discipline you work in, it seems, in philosophy you have to show the reasons why something is wrong. And if you think the issue of emergent properties hasn't been considered in excruciating detail in connection with Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment then you clearly have no idea what philosophy is doing.
Philosophy means you accept the human condition.
Say what? Some philosophy is abstract, but so is some maths. Lots of philosophy (philosophy of science, political philosophy, ethics) is concerned with changing the human condition. Maybe you criticise philosophy because it didn't discover antibiotics (although it did lay a lot of the foundations), but do you criticise biology because it didn't invent democracy? Both changed the human condition, in ways appropriate to their respective disciplines.
If you've ever sat through a class where philosophers have sat there talking themselves in circles about how an object can't both be is-a and has-a at the same time, you (if you're like me) feel like leaping up and just telling them to fucking encode whatever paradox they're trying to create in a object hierarchy, and be done with it. I've long longed to write a book called "Computer Science has figured a lot of your shit out in practice, Philosophers".
The philosophers are way ahead of you. The trouble with your method is that it only shows whether something is possible or not under one particular model of reality, the object-hierarchical model. If you show that it's possible under that model then fine, job done: it's possible. But if you show that it's impossible under that model you've not shown that it's impossible in general. And frankly the most likely outcome is that you can't work out how to do it but can't prove that it's impossible without sitting down with the philosophers and listening to their arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
Python doesn't have turtle graphics
Really?
Languages shouldn't use whitespace. I thought we had established this in the 70's
You want to get your religion from ancient books, go ahead. Those of us who are more scientifically minded will look to the evidence.
"Theory" is a clothing store? That's what your link takes me to...
My first language was FOCAL, and BASIC came as a huge relief. Since then I've worked in Ada, C, C#, C++, Forth, FORTRAN, Modula2, Pascal, Python and VBA (not in that order). All except FORTRAN and VBA came as a huge relief from BASIC, but I can't help wondering whether that early BASIC experience is why I never got on with LISP, Haskell, Scheme, OCAML, Prolog etc, all of which I've dabbled in.
Editors are for wimps. Real programmers use Hollerith cards.
So those who are insecure about their masculinity can use Scheme.
Personally I think they made a mistake in that regard, and should have outright prohibited a mix of tabs and spaces for indentation within a single file. In practice, though, it's not a big deal - everyone sane just uses spaces anyway, and most (all?) Python IDEs are configured that way out of the box. There's simply no way you can easily insert a tab in the middle of the code there.
And Python (optionally) warns you if you mix them anyway. Just teach that as a mandatory option.
Yeah, ideologically Python is all wrong and should be terrible. Trouble is, when you actually come to use it, it's great. So religiously you're right, scientifically the post you replied to is right. Evidence beats dogma.
From the article, there's just under 60,000 cameras now.
That's not a reliable figure, though. There is no official figures for the number of CCTVs in use in the UK, and some very dodgy statistics have a very long life. The figure of 60000 comes from a campaign group opposed to CCTV so it is likely to err on the high side.
There was also the argument that he had already been punished for his crimes through the justice system, and it would have been unjust to subject him to a further punishment.
And even better, Number of crimes prevented: A big fat zero.
[citation needed]
The spread of CCTV under Nu Labour is just another illustration of how close socialism is to fascism.
What had NuLabour got to do with socialism?
I'm not claiming that solipsism is a useful way of life (although I think some forms of it are, and I do live like that). I'm claiming that the rejection of solipsism shows that there is a metaphysical underpinning of science. Either scientists reject solipsism outright, which is a metaphysical move, or they accept that solipsism might be right, in which case science can be an excellent pragmatic program (which is what I believe it to be) but loses any claim to being a definite route to truth and itself becomes metaphysical.
It is an answer to the question of how to ask questions. And Popper's argument on metaphysics is quite involved (he argues that the boundary between science and metaphysics is actually a social convention), but the simplest example is the question of how science avoids solipsism.
It might be an interesting approach, in that it could be fun to do and you could well get an article out of it for one of the popular philosophy magazines. But I suspect that you won't find any logical inconsistencies in his "assumptive dichotomy" but won't have vindicated Sartre because an argument being valid doesn't mean that it's sound.
Postmodern philosophy is not a single unified system of thought -- it would be more accurate to speak of postmodern philosophies. Remember that Popper was a postmodern philosopher, so the current understanding of science is based on postmodern philosophy (or rather, on a postmodern philosophy). But yes, some postmodern philosophies question the existence of universal answers (more likely universal certainties, though, which is a different matter). How is that incompatible with the development of technology, which surely only reasonable confidence (not certainty) that something will work for the foreseeable future in reachable space (not universally). Oh, and if your "universal" related to the subjectivity issue, that's covered by the "reasonable confidence".
Yes, there's almost certainly some bad philosophy in postmodernism, just as there's almost certainly some incorrect science that is currently accepted. Postmodernism in philosophy is a set of attempts to correct deficiencies that were identified in modernist philosophy, just as current science contains lots of corrections to deficiencies that were identified in previous scientific models of the world. In both cases, the corrections will have their own deficiencies, which it's the job of the discipline to find and try to correct. And then in both disciplines you get the cranks and crackpots.
It depends on the philosophical argument being made. If they assume certain object relationships cannot exist, and one can show how those relationships are possible in compilable code, odd as it sounds, it explodes the argument.
It doesn't sound odd at all, and I said explicitly that such was the case in which that approach works (my "job done" comment).
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre assumes there are only two types of objects: beings-in-themselves - things like rocks and trees - and beings-for-themselves... conscious entities, which essentially need other objects to think about in order to create themselves out of nothingness, recognize nothingness, and rely on other beings-for-themselves to establish identity. If you look at it from the point of view of a computer scientist, it takes on a really quite implementable model, which you can then discuss concretely without the froofery and meaninglessness of philosophical debate that so turned Wittgenstein off on the field.
If you look at it from a CS perspective (or even a mathematical perspective) then all Sartre has done is partition all entities into two sets, those that "need other objects to think about in order to create themselves out of nothingness, recognize nothingness, and rely on other beings-for-themselves to establish identity" and those that don't. Fine. I don't see how any amount of CS can determine whether the world can necessarily be divided into discrete entities at a level at which those properties apply, whether all entities can unambiguously be assigned to one or other set, or whether both of those sets are necessarily non-empty. If you manage to resolve the first two in the affirmative (quite a philosophical achievement!) and then manage to find at least one member of each set then you have solved the problem. But if you don't manage to find any members for one of the sets (and the non-dasein set requires that you construct a conscious entity -- quite a CS achievement!) then the problem remains open.
Scientists do not treat science as a religion. A religion takes a fixed viewpoint and defends it. Science uses evidence to search for what is.
I suggest you check out Scientism and consider how (or whether) science can be used to support or refute its claims. And philosophy does provide answers. I've already cited Popper, who provided the concept of falsifiability as an answer to the problem of scientific induction faced by the positivists. He also answered the question of whether science can be completely independent of metaphysics (in the negative -- it can't). Perhaps you think that because it doesn't provide scientific answers to scientific questions it doesn't provide any answers to any questions? Science, by definition, changes it's viewpoint when evidence shows the original viewpoint is false/unfounded. Religion, by definition, has a set of unchanging doctrines. There is no comparison between the two. As for philosophy. Philosophy can only teach us whether a question we ask is valid or not and if it is not, how to re-frame it. It cannot and does not provide answers to questions.
That's getting closer. Actually, philosophy gives answers too, but usually a range of answers (along with the strengths and weaknesses of each answer) and Math, Logic, Physics, Sociology choose the ones that are most useful to that particular discipline and then uses those to answer a whole new set of questions. For example, philosophy asks the question "how can we know a statement is true?" One of the answers it gives is the scientific method, and scientists use that to answer questions about the universe. Another answer it gives to the same question is formal logic, and mathematicians use that to answer questions about mathematical hypotheses. Yet another answer they give is that we might never be able to absolutely know anything, which the rest of the world uses to keep a humility check on scientists and mathematicians.
If science has the most scrutiny, it's only because philosophy scrutinises it. Unfortunately, many scientists reject that scrutiny, thinking (mistakenly) that science is self-contained, with nothing to learn from other disciplines. The whole thing you call science is what it is now because philosophers have challenged its past assumptions (such as Popper's challenging the positivists and introducing the notion of falsifiability). That process continues, but too many scientists treat science pretty much as a religion, and are threatened by anything that challenges what they believe about it.
As for "if one philosopher makes a mistake in a leap of logic, because they are of a particular viewpoint to start with, it is fairly likely another will do the same. No-one can actually test it", that pretty much ignores a huge part of what philosophy is. Philosophy actively searches for those unstated viewpoints and challenges them. To say that "nobody can actually test it" is plainly false because they do, routinely.
No, that's a confusion of levels. Remember, the question is "what is a better world". The question of what "works" only makes sense after you have decided what you want to achieve.
Fair point.
Not quite. Philosophy proposes lots of possible answers, technocracy selects one of them.
Missing these kinds of little details is why I have very little respect of philosophers.
They don't "miss" those details, they're not in scope.
As far as I can tell, most of them chose their field because it doesn't punish sloppy work.
Philosophy does punish sloppy work. relentlessly. Philosophical work is subject to more scrutiny and criticism than any discipline I know of, and that includes pure maths.
And then there's idiocy like the Chinese Room, which assumes that a system cannot have properties its components don't have, yet hasn't been laughed out like it should had been.
Laughing something out doesn't work in philosophy. Unlike whatever discipline you work in, it seems, in philosophy you have to show the reasons why something is wrong. And if you think the issue of emergent properties hasn't been considered in excruciating detail in connection with Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment then you clearly have no idea what philosophy is doing.
Philosophy means you accept the human condition.
Say what? Some philosophy is abstract, but so is some maths. Lots of philosophy (philosophy of science, political philosophy, ethics) is concerned with changing the human condition. Maybe you criticise philosophy because it didn't discover antibiotics (although it did lay a lot of the foundations), but do you criticise biology because it didn't invent democracy? Both changed the human condition, in ways appropriate to their respective disciplines.
If you've ever sat through a class where philosophers have sat there talking themselves in circles about how an object can't both be is-a and has-a at the same time, you (if you're like me) feel like leaping up and just telling them to fucking encode whatever paradox they're trying to create in a object hierarchy, and be done with it. I've long longed to write a book called "Computer Science has figured a lot of your shit out in practice, Philosophers".
The philosophers are way ahead of you. The trouble with your method is that it only shows whether something is possible or not under one particular model of reality, the object-hierarchical model. If you show that it's possible under that model then fine, job done: it's possible. But if you show that it's impossible under that model you've not shown that it's impossible in general. And frankly the most likely outcome is that you can't work out how to do it but can't prove that it's impossible without sitting down with the philosophers and listening to their arguments.