
I've been seeing some conversations aimed at expanding the Python community (the community of Python users) beyond the world of computer science and IT, into the Liberal Arts more generally.[0] Of course this is music to my ears. Parallel to this notion that ordinary math learning would be enhanced through mastery of an "executable math notation" (aka a programming language) [K. Iverson], is the idea that contemporary academic philosophy curricula should take these languages more seriously. What's closer to fulfilling the Leibnizian dream of automating thinking, modal logic or Python? Not that it's either/or of course. I've been looking at this one of the Wittgenstein lists.[1] Speaking of philosophy, old timers here know I've poked at this issue of "objectification" i.e. in some corners "to objectify" is a bad thing to do, means you're at best being a cold fish, at worst being inhumane to your fellow humans. I've flagged this as a PR issue we need to address. Along those lines, I've buried a comment for feedback, probably won't get any (too buried).[2] Wev'e got James Bennett in the Django tribe, yakking about the relevance of a philosophy background to his work with Python.[3] Imagine a four-year philosophy program that actually featured some programming. How would we connect Python to a philosophy of mind thread? I try my hand at forging that link on said Wittgenstein list (concluding paragraphs).[4] Kirby [0] http://archives.free.net.ph/message/20090831.140043.d7465e01.en.html [1] http://www.freelists.org/post/wittrsamr/More-on-meaning-as-use-reply-to-Josh... [2] http://theangryblackwoman.com/2009/10/01/the-dos-and-donts-of-being-a-good-a... [3] Excerpt from http://uswaretech.com/blog/2008/04/interview-with-james-bennett-django-relea... James: Well, I wouldn’t say there’s anything specific necessarily. But I think there’s a big place for people with liberal-arts backgrounds to come to programming, and I think philosophy’s a good path to do that. If you look at a typical philosophy program, you’re doing a lot of logic, a lot of critical analysis, a lot of abstract reasoning. You have to get comfortable sooner or later with all sorts of formalisms that don’t necessarily have any practical meaning, and that’s very similar in a lot of ways to programming :) And when you get right down to it, as programmers, about 90% of what we’re paid to do is think: our job is to take a problem, analyze it, break it down into pieces and solve them. And that’s not terribly different from what you spend four years doing in a philosophy program. I’ve actually joked about that a bit with some of my former professors, that I still get to argue as much as when I was doing philosophy, but the programming pays a lot better. I do think, though, that there’s a big need for that sort of thing; we don’t really teach critical thinking anymore, and while it’s a vital skill to have no matter what you do for a living, it’s absolutely crucial to programming. So if you can get a good liberal-arts background where you’ve been taught how to look at things and pick them apart and analyze them, you can definitely do well as a programmer. Though it’d also be a good idea to take at least a few elective math courses… [4] http://www.freelists.org/post/wittrsamr/More-on-meaning-as-use Computer languages were far less evolved when Wittgenstein was writing, however they today provide a clear exhibit of meaning as use, as the language games have everything to do with driving machinery, making things happen, more like those "orders in battle" he was talking about (indeed, we speak of "imperative languages" sometimes, of expressions as "commands"). In the Python language, one tends to use the word "self" a lot, and indeed it plays an analogous role to "self" in ordinary speech, in that every object has one, and because of this "self", each object is "personalized" i.e. rendered distinct from every other, even if it arises from the same blueprint or class definition. Academic logicians may have no training in such a language, as analytic philosophy hasn't upgraded very quickly. If we ever get to a point where contemporary high level computer languages get into the philosophical literature, post-Wittgensteinian especially, we may find we're blessed with yet another tool for dislodging outmoded ways of conceiving of "meaning". [ Speaking of Python, we also have a strong nominalist model in that everything is an object and every object has its names (note use of the plural). Yes, that's right, the very same object may have lots and lots of names, all pointing to the very same thing. It's only when a thing ceases to have any names at all that it's automatically "garbage collected", meaning the memory it occupied is now free to hold other things instead (this memory is called "the heap"). ] So in computer languages we have language games in which "self" has plenty of meaning. It would also be quite permissible to use the word "mind" in place of "self" (the Python interpreter would not fuss at this). Yet no one imagines that this use of "self" or "mind" is with reference to some spooky mental phenomenon that we can't quite put our hands on. There's far less superstition about what it takes for these words to be meaningful. For this reason alone I would urge anyone wishing to understand the later Wittgenstein to pay some attention to computer languages. Kirby

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:25 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote: << trim >> ADDENDUM:
[0] http://archives.free.net.ph/message/20090831.140043.d7465e01.en.html
I acknowledge in advance that some here may send up a red flag re my citing of a post by Xah Lee. The late Arthur Siegel mentioned him a ways back in this archive, asking if I knew him (answer: not yet). http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2006-September/007247.html http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2009-March/172547.html But then both Arthur and I have had our share of detractors, so it's not my place, as a teapot, to call the kettle black. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080107065526AAOSeeK (explaining the idiom). Kirby PS: I see Xah really likes Abbott's 'Flatland', which I do as social satire, but then I think it's been over-used to pump up certain brands of shamanism within the math-physics community (yes, that's a provocative way of putting it, which Juan rightly questioned -- did my best to explain here): http://groups.google.com/group/mathfuture/msg/776d6b1dc2c526c5?hl=en

My degree is in Math and Philosophy. Most of the Foundations of Mathematics courses were in the Philosophy department back then, including a lot of what turned into Computer Science. On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:25, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
I've been seeing some conversations aimed at expanding the Python community (the community of Python users) beyond the world of computer science and IT, into the Liberal Arts more generally.[0] Of course this is music to my ears.
The Two Cultures prejudice is one of the worst ever.
Parallel to this notion that ordinary math learning would be enhanced through mastery of an "executable math notation" (aka a programming language) [K. Iverson], is the idea that contemporary academic philosophy curricula should take these languages more seriously.
What's closer to fulfilling the Leibnizian dream of automating thinking, modal logic or Python? Not that it's either/or of course. I've been looking at this one of the Wittgenstein lists.[1]
We're doing quite well at Artificial Stupidity, I hear. ;->
Speaking of philosophy, old timers here know I've poked at this issue of "objectification" i.e. in some corners "to objectify" is a bad thing to do, means you're at best being a cold fish, at worst being inhumane to your fellow humans.
Reification is also a problem. Most people imagine a world made of things. Wittgenstein tried to imagine a world made of facts. Some scientists have noticed that this is a world of a) we don't know what and b) we don't know how to think about it. Mathematically, the world could just as well (or as poorly) be composed of relations or processes.
I've flagged this as a PR issue we need to address. Along those lines, I've buried a comment for feedback, probably won't get any (too buried).[2]
Wev'e got James Bennett in the Django tribe, yakking about the relevance of a philosophy background to his work with Python.[3]
Imagine a four-year philosophy program that actually featured some programming.
As I said, I did that--Turing machines and several of the Church-equivalent systems, modal and combinatorial logic, recursive function theory, non-standard arithmetic and analysis...
How would we connect Python to a philosophy of mind thread? I try my hand at forging that link on said Wittgenstein list (concluding paragraphs).[4]
Kirby
[0] http://archives.free.net.ph/message/20090831.140043.d7465e01.en.html
[1] http://www.freelists.org/post/wittrsamr/More-on-meaning-as-use-reply-to-Josh...
[2] http://theangryblackwoman.com/2009/10/01/the-dos-and-donts-of-being-a-good-a...
[3] Excerpt from http://uswaretech.com/blog/2008/04/interview-with-james-bennett-django-relea...
James: Well, I wouldn’t say there’s anything specific necessarily. But I think there’s a big place for people with liberal-arts backgrounds to come to programming, and I think philosophy’s a good path to do that. If you look at a typical philosophy program, you’re doing a lot of logic, a lot of critical analysis, a lot of abstract reasoning. You have to get comfortable sooner or later with all sorts of formalisms that don’t necessarily have any practical meaning, and that’s very similar in a lot of ways to programming :) And when you get right down to it, as programmers, about 90% of what we’re paid to do is think: our job is to take a problem, analyze it, break it down into pieces and solve them. And that’s not terribly different from what you spend four years doing in a philosophy program. I’ve actually joked about that a bit with some of my former professors, that I still get to argue as much as when I was doing philosophy, but the programming pays a lot better. I do think, though, that there’s a big need for that sort of thing; we don’t really teach critical thinking anymore, and while it’s a vital skill to have no matter what you do for a living, it’s absolutely crucial to programming. So if you can get a good liberal-arts background where you’ve been taught how to look at things and pick them apart and analyze them, you can definitely do well as a programmer. Though it’d also be a good idea to take at least a few elective math courses…
[4] http://www.freelists.org/post/wittrsamr/More-on-meaning-as-use
Computer languages were far less evolved when Wittgenstein was writing, however they today provide a clear exhibit of meaning as use, as the language games have everything to do with driving machinery, making things happen, more like those "orders in battle" he was talking about (indeed, we speak of "imperative languages" sometimes, of expressions as "commands").
In the Python language, one tends to use the word "self" a lot, and indeed it plays an analogous role to "self" in ordinary speech, in that every object has one, and because of this "self", each object is "personalized" i.e. rendered distinct from every other, even if it arises from the same blueprint or class definition.
Academic logicians may have no training in such a language, as analytic philosophy hasn't upgraded very quickly. If we ever get to a point where contemporary high level computer languages get into the philosophical literature, post-Wittgensteinian especially, we may find we're blessed with yet another tool for dislodging outmoded ways of conceiving of "meaning".
[ Speaking of Python, we also have a strong nominalist model in that everything is an object and every object has its names (note use of the plural). Yes, that's right, the very same object may have lots and lots of names, all pointing to the very same thing. It's only when a thing ceases to have any names at all that it's automatically "garbage collected", meaning the memory it occupied is now free to hold other things instead (this memory is called "the heap"). ]
So in computer languages we have language games in which "self" has plenty of meaning. It would also be quite permissible to use the word "mind" in place of "self" (the Python interpreter would not fuss at this). Yet no one imagines that this use of "self" or "mind" is with reference to some spooky mental phenomenon that we can't quite put our hands on. There's far less superstition about what it takes for these words to be meaningful.
For this reason alone I would urge anyone wishing to understand the later Wittgenstein to pay some attention to computer languages.
Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 10:07 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:
My degree is in Math and Philosophy. Most of the Foundations of Mathematics courses were in the Philosophy department back then, including a lot of what turned into Computer Science.
I did philosophy as well, as an undergrad at Princeton (had to write a thesis and everything). My focus with Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy especially, though I was also taking advantage of having Walter Kaufmann as a teacher, reading my Nietzsche 'n stuff. Richard Rorty was my thesis adviser. I also studied Marx-Freud in conjunction (Adorno etc.), took a History of Mentalities class that was pretty wild 'n crazy (autobio of Malcolm X was assigned reading). Kaufmann had just discovered Erhard's punchy philosophy lectures that previous summer and gets credit for nudging me into a kind of philosophical activism which eventually had me hooking up with the Bucky Fuller group, meeting that network. I was Buckminster Fuller Institutes first web wrangler after he died in 1983, working with Kiyoshi Kuromiya. http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2008/02/philosophy-101.html http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/kiyoshi.html Bill Thurston, the famous topologist, was my honors calculus teacher (you have to teach undergrads at Princeton, no matter how famous and valuable your time). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_w4HYXuo9M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7d13SgqUXg This is where I discovered APL and started haunting the engineering quadrangle (E-quad), sneaking in at night to play with the APL graphics terminals by Tektronix, or sneaking time on a Unix-based PDP with a guest account. But mostly I just had to use punch cards and job control language in those early days of time sharing mainframes, pre-PC. FORTRAN, PL/1... a little this, a little that. Later I became an xBase coder as a day job, mostly working for non-profits and local government agences (that'd be dBase II, III, IV, Foxpro 2, Microsoft Visual Foxpro 3-9). However, growing up I was more thinking I'd be a psychoanalyst someday, maybe a Jungian or something. I was getting into Ernest Becker's 'The Denial of Death' and then Normon O. Brown's 'Love's Body' 'n stuff, a literature I've continued to follow right up to the present, taking 'Walking with Nobby' to the Chicago Pycon as airplane reading. http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/03/airplane-reading.html
On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:25, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
I've been seeing some conversations aimed at expanding the Python community (the community of Python users) beyond the world of computer science and IT, into the Liberal Arts more generally.[0] Of course this is music to my ears.
The Two Cultures prejudice is one of the worst ever.
Yeah, C.P. Snow's chasm. When Dr. Wulf, head of National Academy of Engineering came to Portland, that's what he wanted to talk about: http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2005/04/last-isepp-lecture-2005.html
Parallel to this notion that ordinary math learning would be enhanced through mastery of an "executable math notation" (aka a programming language) [K. Iverson], is the idea that contemporary academic philosophy curricula should take these languages more seriously.
What's closer to fulfilling the Leibnizian dream of automating thinking, modal logic or Python? Not that it's either/or of course. I've been looking at this one of the Wittgenstein lists.[1]
We're doing quite well at Artificial Stupidity, I hear. ;->
AS -- I like it. AI by another name. Or maybe AI = RS (Artificial Intelligence = Real Stupidity). http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2008/04/philosophy-posting.html
Speaking of philosophy, old timers here know I've poked at this issue of "objectification" i.e. in some corners "to objectify" is a bad thing to do, means you're at best being a cold fish, at worst being inhumane to your fellow humans.
Reification is also a problem. Most people imagine a world made of things. Wittgenstein tried to imagine a world made of facts. Some scientists have noticed that this is a world of a) we don't know what and b) we don't know how to think about it. Mathematically, the world could just as well (or as poorly) be composed of relations or processes.
So pick a paradigm and go with it. In a math, we like internal consistency, elegance, a game with clear enough rules that at least it's playable. In OO, we distill everything to objects, which you could describe as giving into a prejudice, going for reification all the way (in for a penny, in for a pound), but hey, it's one way to think. We have others. It's "maths" in the plural in the UK, not a monolithic one size fits all problem domains.
I've flagged this as a PR issue we need to address. Along those lines, I've buried a comment for feedback, probably won't get any (too buried).[2]
Wev'e got James Bennett in the Django tribe, yakking about the relevance of a philosophy background to his work with Python.[3]
Imagine a four-year philosophy program that actually featured some programming.
As I said, I did that--Turing machines and several of the Church-equivalent systems, modal and combinatorial logic, recursive function theory, non-standard arithmetic and analysis...
In Wittgenstein's later philo, ala Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, you have a kind of break from the Anglo-analytic views of the day, in which something called Logic underpins everything "higher". He said logic underpins mathematics much as a painted foundation supports a painted castle (paraphrase). In any case, I'm seeing a lot of good reasons to link his notion of "language games" to our more modern idea of "namespaces". My live-and-let-live philosophy is all about a "no global variables" way of thinking i.e. let's not pretend we're all trying to get into the same namespace once and for all (an imperialist agenda). There are only so many cool words that we'd all like to use, and that old philosophical maneuver "If you don't mean what I mean by 'gravity' then you should say 'shmavity'" is just so *not* what we do in computer programming anymore. We both use 'gravity' but disambiguate by being explicit about namespaces. Undergrads learning philosophy today need to learn about namespaces I'm thinking, why not? Kirby
-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/

I was thinking more about this Python for Philosophers thread and decided to write some "pathological Python" to help make a point, thought readers here might be interested... Note in the short class definition below, that not only do I not use the name 'self' (which is not a keyword) but I use alternative names in each of the two special name methods, 'cogito' and 'me' respectively. Whereas this isn't great style (and I emphasize this in my "Short Talk") it does drive home the point that this first argument is *positional* and has meaning only within that method's scope, so yeah, fine to use any legal name and even to change what that name is from one method to the next ("fine" in the sense of not upsetting the interpreter -- other readers of your code may not appreciate your quirkiness). For more context: http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/10/short-talk.html class Animal: """ A template for any Animal. What's somewhat pathological is the handle to the self object is not consistently named between methods, only within methods -- more traditionally, we would use the word 'self' in place of both 'cogito' and 'me'. """ species = 'unspecified' # set below def __init__(cogito): # my birth event """aquires the species from the template itself Make it be special to me (one self per instance) """ cogito.species = Animal.species def __repr__(me): # my representation return me.color + ' ' + \ me.species + ' ( sex: ' + me.sex + ')' Kirby
participants (2)
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Edward Cherlin
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kirby urner