[themodelplumber]

Sure: It's designed, like any qualitative model, to yield leverage. Know the laws, understand the principles, and soon you can pull off something amazing. Maybe it guides you into a career path within the broad field of CS, or perhaps you use the principles as metaphor-templates for your personal CS education. "In what way could this Hello World program be described as a mathematical object? Is it an axiomatic theory? What is that?" etc.

What I find problematic about the design here, however, is that it is overly referential at the cost of direct information transfer to the reader. Rather than communicate a logical chain of thought regarding a principle, it communicates that such-and-such a thing is thought by so-and-so to be a this-or-that. It seems to have been produced within a system that prioritizes thought-originator-referencing. Which would be fine except I'd imagine that most people who read "The Philosophy of Computer Science" probably aren't expecting what seems a lot like an extended bibliography.

[pasabagi]

I think the problem with communicating a logical chain of thought is that it presupposes the idea that logic is immutable and continuous throughout the chain. In sciences, logic is usually fairly immutable because it's not the object of study, so you can show the ideas, without context, and they'll make sense because the frame of reference is constant.

In philosophy, it's usually the case that if you simply presented the idea, without reference to the thinker, you'd definitely provoke misunderstandings, if not incomprehension. Philosophers don't have a common conceptual vocabulary, so when you think a given thinker is referring to a given idea (say, logic) you can really only say for certain that they're referring to their understanding of the idea.

Further, they don't have a common vocabulary for describing ideas - often to the point that you get 'young' and 'old' versions of the same thinker (for instance, Hume) because they use words in different ways within their own corpus.

So, if you wanted to present a logical chain of ideas, you'd have to develop first, your own logic that is a superset of all the contained systems of thought. Then, you'd have to develop a vocabulary that unifies disparate concepts without reducing their complexity.

Predictably, most philosophers have come to the conclusion it's easier just to organize thought by thinkers rather than ideas. Non-philosophers tend to see this as some kind of veiled appeal to authority - but it isn't really. Philosophers are very happy to pervert, break, or alter the corpus of a given thinker in order to do something new with it.

The strength of philosophy depends on rigorous questioning, and rigorous questioning does not tend to lead to monolithic bodies of thought - and that's what you'd need to produce the kind of logical and lexical superset an idea-oriented approach would need to be practical. Without substantial agreement on very many basic questions, such an approach would undoubtedly just do violence to the ideas.

[elefanten]

That's the style used throughout the whole Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. My guess is that style is used because it originates from and serves the academic community, where references are the norm.

I agree it'd be cool to see the other version of this too.

[nikki93]

Aren’t names always referential, in the sense of refering to a meaning or in the abstract, some memory or experience, or even future experiences, that an interpreter has/is/will have? So is the issue you point out that the names are heavily loaded and proper nouns? And how is that at the cost of information transfer (one might argue it transfers more information since you are sending “heavy words” which decompress to a lot of content under a “lookup”)?

[themodelplumber]

> direct information transfer

[nikki93]

Well, all information transfer involves indirection by name, so what you’re getting at is that this lies on a spectrum where the words use are “heavy” and involve lookups where the definitions aren’t in the reader’s cache already? I’m pointing to a parallel here for similar “lookups” in the interpretation of a program by computer ... so maybe the issue is the programs analogous to the way this page is written involve like far network fetches.

[aje403]

This has zero practical usage unless you have a personal interest in the subject, in which case, go for it