Computer Science as a Branch of Knowledge

Abstract

The article is an attempt to answer the question of the status of computer science as a branch of knowledge and its place among other disciplines. Four views on the status of computer science as a branch of knowledge dominate nowadays among computer scientists and philosophers. The first of them is a claim that science is a branch of mathematics. Because writing programs is a basic activity of computer scientists, which is in fact a mathematical activity, so a computer science is a formal science, simply a party of mathematics. But not all agree with this view—some specialists claim that writing computer programs is a kind of experiment and that computer science is a natural science. Experimenting using computers is not only a supporting method in other sciences but it plays an important role within the very computer science. However, many computer scientists believe that treating their discipline as a formal or natural science neglects the basic objective of computer science, i.e. problem solving using computers. So computer science is not a science at all, it is an engineering discipline. The fourth, currently dominating view claims that computer science is a new discipline of knowledge that uses engineering, experimental and formal methods. But it is neither a branch of mathematics, nor a natural science, nor an engineering discipline.