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People forget that Alan Turing's essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published in Mind, a major philosophy journal. People forget that Boolean alg
by keeler 9y ago
People forget that Alan Turing's essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published in Mind, a major philosophy journal.
People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called "The Laws of Thought," where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying thought. If you think that isn't something "philosophers do," this is an ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle's logic, up through Descartes, and into figures such as Leibniz (who independently invented calculus and played an important role in giving us the binary number system), Chomsky, and Jerry Fodor. Philosophy is one of the disciplines in the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Science.
Much of the most important work on the foundations of mathematics was done by philosophers with a mathematical bent (or mathematicians with a philosophical bent, depending on how you want to look at it). Set theory. Incompleteness. First-order logic was invented by Frege.
A lot of the technology we're using right now is traceable back to the work of philosophers.
I've always found that the best way to think of philosophy is simply as inquiry. As a line of inquiry progresses, it may bud off into a field in its own right. Physicists today would have been called Natural Philosophers in Newton's time. In fact, before Newton it was Descartes' physics that reigned supreme in the academy. Some lines of inquiry might not bud off despite significant advancements, such as logic.
Of course, I don't mean to say that philosophy and inquiry are purely synonymous. There's something vague about what the discipline of philosophy exactly is. But I don't think that's too terribly important. The question is what philosophers do. Some of the stuff philosophers "do" would probably strike some readers here as very "heads in the clouds" type stuff. But some of the other stuff, I think HN would find interesting. Check out work by Hillary Putnam. Or Jerry Fodor, if you're interested in "language of thought" type stuff that bears some similarity to Boole's project in The Laws of Thought. Chomsky recently published a newish collection of essays called What "Kind of Creatures Are We?", which is worth a look too.
- gfody 9y agoI would also plug Chomksy's New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind for anyone interested in this sort of thing. also relevant: https://xkcd.com/435 https://xkcd.com/435 - if it went further to the right Mathematics is just applied Philosophy.
- keeler 9y agoGood call. New Horizons is excellent.
- AquinasCoder 9y agoIt always fascinates me that often these "heads in the clouds" type stuff has an enormous impact on history, politics, and other disciplines while what is supposed to be more practical often is ignored or belittled. The most plausible reason is that we have firmer convictions in the little things rather than the large things. This seems to reveal the contemporary, and speaking in philosophical lingo, "modern" tendency to place epistemology as prior to metaphysics. The exception to this thought is the field of ethics. Logic too has been explored in depths through computer science, but this is still -- historically speaking -- in its infancy. The difference between formal logic and computer science is also a gap that cannot be underestimated.
- keeler 9y agoKeep your audience in mind. This is Hacker News. If this were a website for lawyers, political scientists, and historians I would have given a different answer to the question of "What, exactly, do philosophers do?" For them, the language of thought and issues at the foundations of mathematics qualify as "heads in the clouds" type stuff. I would have also given a different answer if the primary group here were, say, physicists, astronomers, and chemists. For them, the answers I would have given to the lawyers, political scientists, and historians would have likewise been "heads in the clouds" type stuff. Philosophy has unseen tendrils in almost everything. You can only get someone to see it (or, really, care about it) when it's something they're already interested in.
- vacri 9y agoHN isn't particularly philosophy-friendly. I've talked about how philosophy was crucial in laying down the philosophy of science and working out the scientific method, only to be drowned in a sea of "wasn't necessary, it's self-evident" sorts of comments.
- jhanschoo 9y agoIt's funny because it took philosophy centuries to see that—and even now, the scientific method is showing limitations; its too difficult to perform in the social sciences and the less rigorous method of extracting trends off big data also often has great value.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago>Of course, I don't mean to say that philosophy and inquiry are purely synonymous. There's something vague about what the discipline of philosophy exactly is. But I don't think that's too terribly important. I think it's pretty important, actually, because the more strictly we nail down the rules of what counts as Good Philosophy, the more it may actually diverge from really proper Inquiry into our original, pre-philosophical concerns. I'm probably unorthodox in thinking this, but I really do think the job of philosophy ought to be to answer or dissolve our pre-philosophical questions, in ways that address what we actually meant by those questions, rather than merely playing Philosophy as a disciplinary language-game.