ComputerScience

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The unholy offspring of ElectricalEngineering? and DeepMathematics?, which spawned a field more akin to BlackMagic or TimeManagement? or InformationTheory than either. There is real ComputerScience research, just as there is real ArtificialIntelligence research, but for the most part, the uses of computers is at best tangental and at most antithetical to what ComputerScience is about. As my wife the PoliticalScience? Ph.D. says, "Any discipline that has to call itself science in its name, isn't". --DaveJacoby

Depends on varying definitions of science, maybe it's all more natural, social or information philosophy then anything else... -- AnonymousContributor?

I think ComputerScience has too much of hard knowledge in it to be called a philosophy. On the other hand, there is too little critical potential for a science. Perhaps ComputerEngineering? would do better. -- HelmutLeitner

Speaking as someone currently doing a BA degree in Philosophy in the UK, and someone who's been involved with computers for so many years he's lost count.... I don't find philosophy and computer science to be anything like each other. At least, not at a high level. There are some aspects which are similar, like for example the use of predicate logic, the fact both are tools without inherent ends, and the fact that both could arguably be classified as an 'activity' or process.... but imho, they are very different. Natural it certainly isn't either. Human beings did NOT evolve to spend 8 hours a day in front of a screen. Social? In some ways (IRC, anyone?) but not as social as real life..... I think the word that sums it up most is 'information' or 'informational'. -ShenWo?

Maybe that Informatica (the dutch term for it) isn't such a bad name, although I would like to call the part dealing with algorithms Algorithmics,. -- AnonymousContributor?

This paper by PhilAgre? (http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/research.html) has a brilliant discussion on what "computer science" is.

-- PhilJones

I'm not sure I consider this breathless and largely untrue assertion to be particularly brilliant: "Of course, computer science rests on formal language theory...". The fact that the author keeps coming back to it in his dizzying postmodern deconstructionism is not encouraging. This man may have read some Chomsky, but I don't see how Turing, Von Neumann, Church, Shannon, or Dijkstra, just to name a few authorities off the top of my head, would go along. -- ChuckAdams

ComputerScience

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