[igravious]

> Computer programming is applied analytic philosophy

A program may direct its attention to any sort of digitally represented piece of information–as computer science progresses the things that can be represented expand over time. What in the main analytic philosophers care about are philosophical concepts which are a subset of all knowledge. Therefore by this reckoning computer programming is not applied analytic philosophy.

You are also suggesting that there is some sort of pure/applied distinction within analytic philosophy. That's unorthodox. If there were such a distinction though you're suggesting that software engineering might be the way we take philosophical formalisms and apply them to the world. I think philosophers would argue that philosophy already does that.

[sedachv]

Here is a definition of analytic philosophy from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_Philosophy):

"As a philosophical practice, [analytic philosophy] is characterized by an emphasis on argumentative clarity and precision, often making use of formal logic, conceptual analysis, and, to a lesser degree, mathematics and the natural sciences."

That is exactly what you do when you are doing computer programming. So computer programming is the practice of applying the techniques of analytic philosophy to computers.

[igravious]

No it is not.

Read your own excerpt. analytic philosophy is a philosophical practice; computer programming is a software engineering practice.

They are not the same thing.

That's not to say that the practice of philosophy couldn't be done digitally. I'm sure over time more and more of it will. But to go from there to applied analytic philosophy is computer programming is nonsensical.

[sedachv]

Sorry, I don't think you know anything about the history of the relationship between computer programming and philosophy. Kurt Gödel was an analytic philosopher. John McCarthy's work stems directly from analytic philosophy, and goes all the way back to Descartes' ideas.

[nullpunkt]

I find your reasoning quite short-sighted.

[igravious]

Do you? I've been thinking about this for rather a long time–not that that's any iron-clad guarantee as to how correct I am but it does tell you that it's not something I'm coming up with off the cuff. I'd be happy to elaborate. What in particular do you think I'm being short-sighted about? Note that I think that the business of philosophy is entirely compatible with computational methods, I just think that the claim that computer programming is equivalent to applied analytic philosophy† is one that makes no sense to me.

The main reason being, and I'll restate myself–philosophy is not concerned with all concepts, only a subset of them, those that are deemed to be philosophical concepts–what those are is another matter and a very very very interesting question in its own right. This is what differentiates philosophy from other fields that use the same cognitive techniques and methods, the same proscriptions and sensitivities‡ of which there are both many fields, many methods, and many pitfalls. How all the latter translates into software is one matter and is not up for debate here. What I am saying is that computer programming (as an activity, one that is done by a human to a computer) can deal with any concept and that makes it potentially much broader in scope than what philosopher's do, methodologically they can over time be made compatible–at the moment they are distant kin.

† i've made a best guess/good faith at what that's supposed to refer to

‡ what I mean by "cognitive techniques and methods, the same proscriptions and sensitivities" is the business of conceptual analysis and construction–learning about how concepts work and how we manipulate them mentally and how we communicate them, the practice of training oneself to to avoid errors in your thinking, learning about fallacies and applying them, learning to debate in good faith with yourself and others, learning about biases in human cognition, learning to spot these biases in ones own thoughts