[deltaonefour]

Often the category is a language phenomenon. The language or the word spawns a philosophical debate but nobody realizes that it's just a poorly defined arbitrary word/category and the whole debate is actually centered around a language quirk.

For example what's the difference between a boat and a raft? At what point is a water vehicle a boat and at what point is it a raft? Any debate on this is simply a linguistic debate disguised as a philosophical one. There's a gradient from boat to raft and people are just debating about a positional problem of where the line of delineation falls. This example is obvious though.

Less obvious is the word "life." When is something classified as living and when is it it classified as not alive? Is a rock alive? Is a plant? Is a deep learning dall-e 3 alive? Is a human alive? Is a brain dead human alive? Seems like a deep philosophical argument but my point here is to say that this argument is as pointless as the boat and the raft.

This thread is the same thing. Pointless debate on whether CS is a liberal arts or not? It's a debate on linguistics. You're all just trying to debate about definitions of arbitrary words. Nothing interesting.

[barrysteve]

If you were stuck on a desert island, would you prefer a boat or a raft to rescue you? I'd pick boat everytime.

Words do have meaning and in a sense it's all we have.

Approaching CS as a series of abstract mathematical problems to solve can make you a very good programmer. Finding the right place in society to sell your .exe's is sometimes better solved by a programmer with a liberal arts education.

[deltaonefour]

>Approaching CS as a series of abstract mathematical problems to solve can make you a very good programmer. Finding the right place in society to sell your .exe's is sometimes better solved by a programmer with a liberal arts education.

Liberal arts is like a business degree. You don't need a business degree to be good at business. In fact, the business degree is largely useless when it comes to business.

But this is besides the fact. The point is I don't actually care whether you call CS a science, a math, or a liberal arts major. It's not a profound question at all. It's more of a question I would classify as stupid. The debate around it occurs because although the question is stupid, it is deceptively profound... Similar to the question of, "what is life?"

> If you were stuck on a desert island, would you prefer a boat or a raft to rescue you? I'd pick boat everytime.

Oh you mean you want to be rescued by this boat: https://www.amazon.com/Intex-Explorer-3-Person-Inflatable-Fr...

Instead of this raft?: https://www.comfortboats.com/en/home

Again the point is the words have a fuzzy delineation. Where this point of delineation exactly lies is not an interesting or profound question, just like the question of whether or not CS is a liberal art.