Chapter One Computer Science

Text One

Philosophy of Computer Science

A number of computer scientists have argued for the distinction of three separate paradigms in computer science. Peter Wegner argued that those paradigms are science, technology, and mathematics.Peter Denning's working group argued that they are theory, abstraction (modeling), and design Amnon H.Eden described them as the “rationalist paradigm” (which treats computer science as a branch of mathematics, which is prevalent in theoretical computer science, and mainly employs deductive reasoning),the “technocratic paradigm” (which might be found in engineering approaches, most prominently in software engineering), and the “scientific paradigm” (which approaches computer-related artifacts from the empirical perspective of natural sciences, identifiable in some branches of artificial intelligence).