The Philosophy of Computer Science (opens in new tab)

Me too! If anyone has any fantastic niche web encyclopaedia links, link away!

They definitely deserve a shout-out too, these two resources happily got me through a couple of undergrad philosophy electives!

I think the problem with communicating a logical chain of thought is that it presupposes the idea that logic is immutable and continuous throughout the chain. In sciences, logic is usually fairly immutable because it's not the object of study, so you can show the ideas, without context, and they'll make sense because the frame of reference is constant.

In philosophy, it's usually the case that if you simply presented the idea, without reference to the thinker, you'd definitely provoke misunderstandings, if not incomprehension. Philosophers don't have a common conceptual vocabulary, so when you think a given thinker is referring to a given idea (say, logic) you can really only say for certain that they're referring to their understanding of the idea.

Further, they don't have a common vocabulary for describing ideas - often to the point that you get 'young' and 'old' versions of the same thinker (for instance, Hume) because they use words in different ways within their own corpus.

So, if you wanted to present a logical chain of ideas, you'd have to develop first, your own logic that is a superset of all the contained systems of thought. Then, you'd have to develop a vocabulary that unifies disparate concepts without reducing their complexity.

Predictably, most philosophers have come to the conclusion it's easier just to organize thought by thinkers rather than ideas. Non-philosophers tend to see this as some kind of veiled appeal to authority - but it isn't really. Philosophers are very happy to pervert, break, or alter the corpus of a given thinker in order to do something new with it.

The strength of philosophy depends on rigorous questioning, and rigorous questioning does not tend to lead to monolithic bodies of thought - and that's what you'd need to produce the kind of logical and lexical superset an idea-oriented approach would need to be practical. Without substantial agreement on very many basic questions, such an approach would undoubtedly just do violence to the ideas.

That's the style used throughout the whole Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. My guess is that style is used because it originates from and serves the academic community, where references are the norm.

I agree it'd be cool to see the other version of this too.

Aren’t names always referential, in the sense of refering to a meaning or in the abstract, some memory or experience, or even future experiences, that an interpreter has/is/will have? So is the issue you point out that the names are heavily loaded and proper nouns? And how is that at the cost of information transfer (one might argue it transfers more information since you are sending “heavy words” which decompress to a lot of content under a “lookup”)?

This has zero practical usage unless you have a personal interest in the subject, in which case, go for it

> Computer programming is applied analytic philosophy

A program may direct its attention to any sort of digitally represented piece of information–as computer science progresses the things that can be represented expand over time. What in the main analytic philosophers care about are philosophical concepts which are a subset of all knowledge. Therefore by this reckoning computer programming is not applied analytic philosophy.

You are also suggesting that there is some sort of pure/applied distinction within analytic philosophy. That's unorthodox. If there were such a distinction though you're suggesting that software engineering might be the way we take philosophical formalisms and apply them to the world. I think philosophers would argue that philosophy already does that.

Can you expand on this? To me, Plato seems like a fairly good fit for the computer world. I also think that, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, OO patterns make some kind of sense - since they allow us to clarify problems as being subsets of more general ones.

Should people work on OpenSource at all after reading Niccolò Machiavelli?

I'd also like to hear more about what you mean. I imagine 'Platonism' refers to his theory of the forms, which as an example of abstraction seems pretty useful, if taken in his case to an extreme. He seems pretty solid on modeling problems without getting caught up in implementation details, at least.

+100000000

I don't think Taleb has engaged with academic philosophers. He prefers to portray himself as someone grounded in empiricism, and talks down "intellectual-yet-idiot" academics who lose the forest for the trees, in loving their flawed simplifications/abstractions more than the reality they are trying to model [1]. A lot of his ire is directed at economists' over-reliance on flawed mathematical assumptions (particularly relating to modeling randomness), and more broadly, academics in the less empirically grounded fields. I take his principal point to be that the modern approach to decision making under uncertainty (due to being neither theoretically nor empirically rigorous) is just a bunch of fashionable nonsense that has displaced several useful traditional/folk thumb rules which might superficially appear to conflict with the modern scientific models, but represent valuable insights won through hard experience. Most of his writing/speaking directed at a general audience is polemical, and often feels like he is ranting, so YMMV. If you're interested in getting a quick flavor of his work, try his talk at the National Science Foundation [2].

FWIW, several of Taleb's key points expound on some statements by Hume [3] and Seneca [4], so he does value certain works/ideas nominally considered philosophy.

[1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e... (Taleb shares several of his articles/book-excerpts on Medium)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omsYJBMoIJU

[3] https://philosophynow.org/issues/69/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4MhC5tcEv0&feature=youtu.be...

PS: Having written this comment on HN makes me feel very weird, stating (my understanding of) the opinions of some particular person, but I just felt like responding to a sincere question.

Yes. I mean wikipedia answers it for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb

Or one of my personal favorites, the Epistemology of Computer Simulations in Science:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simulations-science/#EpiC...

Comparing and contrasting how computers think and learn compared to us certainly is an interesting idea. I tend to think of myself as epistemologically agnostic, but not for lack of trying. I haven't kept up to speed on neural net development, do there could be some fascinating insights there.

Thanks for the links. I'll definitely check this out.

I don't think I've disparaged anyone here. Being skeptical is one of the oldest traditions in philosophy. If one can't handle skepticism, they are in the wrong field.