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ComputerScience?

Does ComputerScience? actually belong here? Science is typically the process of understanding how the mechanisms of the natural world work through empirical study. ComputerScience? is more building things, engineering, and a little theoretical mathematics. It should get its own category, I think. -JoshuaGrosse

I am happy calling Computer Science a science. Perhaps I am too liberal, since I see even greater lacunae above: where are the social sciences? Psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science? The fact is, in many ways the word "science" is more a word of ideology, the way it is often used. A fairly top level page should somewhere explain this, and then perhaps deal instead not with science, or technology, or the humanities, but instead the concept of discipline. All of the above mentioned are at least that. Then we can define breakdowns of disciplines, along at least three lines: science/humanities and theoretical/practical, empirical/conceptual and show the somewhat contentious and fuzzy classification of the disciplines.

With this classification, computer science is a mixture dealing with the practical in many cases (software engineering), but in other cases the conceptual rather than the empirical (computability), and in still other cases with other parts of this division. --CalvinOstrum


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Last edited February 15, 2001 7:37 pm by cobrand.bomis.com (diff)
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