Dominic: You mention mathematics but don't make the I think obvious
connection: that computer "science" is actually a branch of mathematics.
The work in the real world is applied mathematics, a form of engineering.
At 09:25 PM 7/25/2003 +0100, you wrote:
> > Very crudely, our two competing models of the scientific process are: (a)
> > the scientific realist view (yours) that science proceeds by discovery to
> > explain phenomena and (b) the sort of view that Popper, Kuhn and others
> > represent (mine) that scientists create hypotheses which they then test
> > predictively against phenomena. Although the former's scope and ambition
> > exceeds that of the latter, the two differ little in their attitude to
>error
> > and how it may be found.
>
>Moving to a place of less anxiety, "computer science" has the luxury of
>being able to identify with the greatest confidence realities that are
>entirely synthetic. First define your Turing machine, and a great deal else
>in the canon necessarily follows (there _is_, _really_, no solution to the
>halting problem; it _is_, _really_, possibly to perform such-and-such a
>computation in linear rather than quadratic time, etc). The mild scandal is
>that Turing machines actually do real work in the world, such that
>descriptions of their functioning under various conditions turn out to be
>descriptions of actual going concerns, e.g. when the computer is piloting a
>cruise missile. The more general form of this scandal is the scandalous
>relationship between abstract mathematics - synthetic "truths" derived by
>inference rather than observation - and real-world effects like suspension
>bridges, Moore's law and the aforementioned cruise missiles.
>
>I appreciate your writing here, by the way - it's clear and patient in a way
>that I rather fear mine is not.
>
>Dominic
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