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From: spf@clyde.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Is Computer Science Science?
Message-ID: <13949@clyde.ATT.COM>
Date: Thu, 17-Sep-87 16:50:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: clyde.13949
Posted: Thu Sep 17 16:50:28 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 19-Sep-87 07:34:09 EDT
References: <5113@sunybcs.UUCP> <6195@apple.UUCP> <5068@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> <737@elmgate.UUCP> <2474@cvl.umd.edu>
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Reply-To: spf@moss.UUCP (Steve Frysinger)
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Keywords: computers Science not bloody likely

In article <2474@cvl.umd.edu> ramesh@cvl.UUCP (Ramesh Sitaraman) writes:
>In article <737@elmgate.UUCP> ram@elmgate.UUCP (Randy Martens) writes:
>>I am of the firm opinion that there is NO such thing as
>>computer science.  
>Unfortunately you are totally wrong!!!  The scientific part of CS
>deals with unravelling the nature of computation. This is the 
>object of study of theoretical areas such as Complexity theory,
>recursive function theory, programming language semantics etc. 

Fair enough.  But I think if you examine these (and others, such
as automata and graph theories), you'll find that they really
are specialties of mathematics.  And (in my view of the universe),
mathematics is either (a) language, or (b) philosophy, or (c) both.
But not science.  My requirement is stricter than most dictionaries
will give you (but dictionaries follow contemporary usage, so that's
not surprising).  I require that science study nature (I actually
prefer the term "natural philosophy").  And I don't subscribe to
the Platonic view that things like numbers and trig functions are
part of nature.  I think they are linguistic inventions.  Most
real sciences USE mathematics to describe their observations and
hypotheses.

Steve Frysinger
**
"The nice thing about philosophy is that everybody can be right."