Know Your Discipline: Teaching the Philosophy of Computer Science

Abstract

The diversity and interdisciplinarity of computer science and the multiplicity of its uses in other sciences make it hard to define computer science and to prescribe how computer science should be carried out. The diversity of computer science also causes friction between computer scientists from different branches. Computer science curricula, as they stand, have been criticized for being unable to offer computer scientists proper methodological training or a deep understanding of different research traditions. At the Department of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Joensuu we decided to include in our curriculum a course that offers our students an awareness of epistemological and methodological issues in computer science, and we wanted to design the course to be meaningful for practicing computer scientists. In this article the needs and aims of our course on the philosophy of computer science are discussed, and the structure and arrangements—the whys, whats, and hows—of that course are explained. The course, which is given entirely on-line, was designed for advanced graduate or postgraduate computer science students from two Finnish universities: the University of Joensuu and the University of Kuopio. The course has four relatively broad themes, and all those themes are tied to the students’ everyday work or their own research topics. I have prepared course readings about each of those four themes. The course readings describe, in a compact and simple form, the cruces of the topics that are discussed in the course. The electronic version of the course readings includes hyperlinks to a large number of articles that are available on-line. The course readings are publicly available on the course home page, and they are licensed under the creative commons license.

Three traditions of computing: what educators should know

“…There was the objection that proofs are products of social processes (De Millo, Lipton, & Perlis, 1979), the objection that the physical world, vis-a`-vis mathematical abstractions, is uncertain (Fetzer, 1988), and the objection that there is an insurmountable gap between models and the world (Smith, 1985(Smith, /1996. Those objections are outlined below -for more detailed summaries of the formal verification debate see, for example, Colburn (2000) and Tedre (2007aTedre ( , 2007b.…”

“…In the debates about the soul of computing disciplines the scientific nature of computing has been most controversial (see, for example, Forsythe, 1967Forsythe, , 1969Newell, Perlis, & Simon, 1967;Rosenbloom, 2004; for an overview see Tedre, 2007a). The question is often about whether computing is a science in the same sense that natural sciences are.…”

“…The first problem is, of course, that there is no consensus of what the term science means. Science can be considered to be a class of specific activities, a sociocultural and historical phenomenon, a kind of knowledge, a societal institution, a world view, a specific style of thinking and acting, or a profession (Tedre, 2007a). Some people have proposed idealized versions of science (see, for example, Ayer, 1936Ayer, /1971Hempel, 1965;Popper, 1935Popper, /1959, whereas some have argued that scientists do not actually work according to any rigid guidelines, and that there neither is nor should be a fixed set of rules suitable for all branches of science (Feyerabend, 1975(Feyerabend, /1993.…”

Reflexões e Desafios sobre a Formação na Ética em Pesquisa na Computação envolvendo Humanos

“…Aética em pesquisa na Computação envolve vários atores como os sujeitos da pesquisa, os pesquisadores responsáveis, as instituições realizadoras/apoiadoras e osórgãos de fomento. Ela pode ser enxergada como um objeto de estudo da metodologia de pesquisa científica na Computação [Wazlawick 2014]; ou como um objeto daÉtica em Computação de uma forma geral [Tedre 2007].…”

Health and human rights: epistemological status and perspectives of development

“…The analysis of a discipline's epistemological status allows us to circumscribe and limit the borders of its realm, evaluate the pertinence of its founding principles, respond to potential identity crises, or justify its theories and practices (Zins 2006;Lézé 2007;Berthelot 2000;Jenkins 2003). For practitioners, knowledge and understanding of their discipline's concepts makes it easier to collaborate with theorists, and develop training programmes that are well-adapted to their field (Tedre 2007). Likewise, the theoretical inputs on a discipline's foundations may be instrumental when it comes to filling in gaps of understanding and between laypersons, scientists, and political decision-makers with regard to the perceived needs of research, programmes to be implemented, and resource allocation needed to build the field (Choi et al 2005;Garvin 2002).…”