Philosophy of Computer Science

The hours whiled away on plato.stanford.edu shouldn't count toward a man's life. :)

Something I'm not grokking:

In the exposition the list of examples presented as typical of Computer Science – "certainly not just programming" – is this one at the end of the list:

"... the design of embedded systems ..."

Huh?

Why doesn't that fit? There is no further direct discussion on the page that could apply (that I found). Is it a modern perspective that the embedded world and the high-end world are becoming so blurred as to be identical (such as Linux on both)? Is it simply Moore's law in action reducing the cost of embedded solutions to the point that embedded design is no longer something special?

The other examples, "the construction and optimisation of compilers, interpreters, theorem provers and type inference systems," clearly hit meta-activity more than "just programming."

Maybe it means embedded design is a transcendent synthesis? http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

There is scholarpedia:

http://www.scholarpedia.org

At the moment the majority of the articles are on computational neuroscience, but it is slowly starting to expand.

On the same subject and also peer-reviewed, there's the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy which is brilliant : http://www.iep.utm.edu/

Agreed! The Stanford Encyclopedia is really awesome - helped so much with my undergrad philosophy degree. Somehow it manages to be topical and in-depth at the same time.

Agreed. SEOP was one of the best resources I made use of as an undergrad

It looks to me like it questions what computers are, how they work, what they do, and their moral use. These things are difficult to understand but they are certainly not nonsense (nor is deconstruction for that matter).

I think in the general sense, any "contributions of philosophy or philosophy of science to actual science" would end up being science, not philosophy. Consider the different interpretations of quantum mechanics -- in an earlier age these sorts of discussions would fall under the rubric of natural philosophy. However, nowadays these theoretical and experimental discussions are properly conducted within the sphere of physics.

So to look for direct contributions of philosophy to science is to commit a kind of category mistake, since science is a self-correcting model based on experimental verification of theory. Anything that can be verified (well, more pointedly, falsified) through experimentation is within the domain of science -- it is science. Anything that can't really be falsified through experimentation doesn't really have a place within the scientific framework.

Now, it takes a philosophy of science to make this separation of non-science from science, so that's at least one indirect contribution anyway.

First of all in academia you will often find subjects that may very well prove to be irrelevant to practical activities, not just in Philosophy, but also in Mathematics, Physics or Political Science. However, I do think that a great deal of these theoretical questions can be of great help also for practical activities. Philosophy of Science deals with, among other things, questions such as "is there a particular method with which we can find the truth or is it just anything goes? Is there even truth, and if so, what constitutes truth?" If you are an academic and you are doing research I would say this is a fairly relevant question since the theoretical paradigm you follow directly influences the way you are going to conduct research. Another example could be AI, where frequently philosophers work together with scientists. IBM or Google are working on remodelling the human brain, but this task is highly difficult since intelligence is not just based on computational power (which explains why advances in technology do not directly correlate with advances in AI), but there are fundamental differences. So philosophers, together with neuroscientists, try to find an understanding of what constitutes the human consciousness, which is a very wide but fascinating field. Last but not least Ethics also constitutes an important subject in philosophy that has direct influences on the way we deal with future advances in technology and there are too many examples to think of. Philosophy can be a frustrating subject since there is almost never a satisfying moment where you reach a final conclusion and hence many people dismiss the discipline as a group of people who never tend to shower sit on the couch and talk about the universe. There are many schools of thought, not just postmodern feminism. In fact, there are also an abundance of philosophers that have a true passion for science as well as renowned scientists who also shared a great enthusiasm for this academic discipline. Philosophy helps you to precisize your thoughts and sharpens the theoretical framework of your investigations. How can this not be supporting practical research?

SEP is helpful in many matters philosophy-related: I find that the articles are usually a very sound combination of historical as well as problem-oriented perspectives with references to contemporary / recent research. The SEP is generally well-regarded in academic circles, AFAIK.

It really depends on what you want to learn. As you know, with the diversity of philosophy (language, science, law, art, mind, etc.), there are many different types of educational roadmaps.

What are you wanting to learn?