Beyond positivism in computer science
Markus Luczak–Roesch · ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 2013
A discourse on modeling and specializationIt is accredited to Marie Curie that she said: "In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons."This seems to be a viewpoint which is very common in Computer Science where a core competence is to model solutions in a rational way as the following two examples illustrate: Algorithms are models that describe the data input, flow, manipulation, and output necessary to compute a terminal deterministic solution in finite time on a computer; Web ontologies are models that represent a consensual and consistent state of domain knowledge conforming to Web standards.Computer Science teaches humans to model things by standards and technologies which are valid in a digital computer systems.But how are these "things" different from those in physics meant by Marie Curie?Comparing the modeling of a pendulum with the facebook "like" button is a very intriguing example of Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific