Philosophy COURSENUMBER and Linguistics COURSENUMBER SHORT COURSE TITLE? or: **What Philosophers and Linguists Can Learn From Theoretical Computer Science But Didn't Know To Ask** ## Announcements ## The course meets starting on XXX, at ZZZ, in room YYY. ## Overview ## The goal of this seminar is to introduce concepts and techniques from theoretical computer science and show how they can provide insight into established philosophical and linguistic problems. This is not a seminar about any particular technology or software. Rather, it's about a variety of conceptual/logical ideas that have been developed in computer science and that linguists and philosophers ought to know, or may already be unknowingly trying to reinvent. Philosphers and linguists tend to reuse the same familiar tools in ever more (sometime spectacularly) creative ways. But when your only hammer is classical logic, every problem looks like modus ponens. In contrast, computer scientists have invested considerable ingenuity in studying tool design, and have made remarkable progress. "Why shouldn't I reinvent some idea X for myself? It's intellectually rewarding!" Yes it is, but it also takes time you might have better spent elsewhere. After all, you can get anywhere you want to go by walking, but you can accomplish more with a combination of walking and strategic subway rides. More importantly, the idiosyncrasies of your particular implementation may obscure what's fundamental to the idea you're working with. Your implementation may be buggy in corner cases you didn't think of; it may be incomplete and not trivial to generalize; its connection to existing literature and neighboring issues may go unnoticed. For all these reasons you're better off understanding the state of the art. The theoretical tools we'll be introducing aren't very familiar to everyday programmers, but they are prominent in academic computer science, especially in the fields of functional programming and type theory. Of necessity, this course will lay a lot of logical groundwork. But throughout we'll be aiming to mix that groundwork with real cases in our home subjects where these tools play central roles. Our aim for the course is to enable you to make these tools your own; to have enough understanding of them to recognize them in use, use them yourself at least in simple ways, and to be able to read more about them when appropriate. Once we get up and running, the central focii of the course will be **continuations**, **types**, and **monads**. One of the on-going themes will concern evaluation order and issues about how computations (inferences, derivations) unfold in (for instance) time. The key analytic technique is to form a static, order-independent model of a dynamic process. We'll be discussing this in much more detail as the course proceeds. The logical systems we'll be looking at include: * the pure/untyped lambda calculus * combinatorial logic * the simply-typed lambda calculus * polymorphic types with System F * some discussion of dependent types * if time permits, "indeterministic" or "preemptively parallel" computation and linear logic ## Who Can Participate? ## The course will not presume previous experience with programming. We will, however, discuss concepts embodied in specific programming languages, and we will encourage experimentation with running, modifying, and writing computer programs. The course will not presume lots of mathematical or logical background, either. However, it will demand a certain amount of comfort working with such material. And it wouldn't be especially well-suited to be a first graduate-level course in formal semantics or philosophy of language. If you have concerns about your background, come discuss them with us. It hasn't yet been decided whether this course counts for satisfying the logic requirement for Philosophy PhD students. Faculty and students from outside of NYU Linguistics and Philosophy are wlecome to audit, to the extent that this coheres well with the needs of our local students. ## Recommended Readings and Software ## *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, currently $23 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262560992/ref=pd_sim_books/103-5471398-9229403#reader_0262560992). This is a classic text introducing the gentle art of programming, using the functional programming language Scheme. Many people love this book, but it has an unusual dialog format that is not to everybody's taste. **Of particular interest for this course** is the explanation of the Y combinator, available as a free sample chapter [at the MIT Press web page for the book](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/). [[How to get the programming languages running on your computer]] ## Schedule of Topics ## To be added. ---- All wikis are supposed to have a [[SandBox]], so this one does too. This wiki is powered by [[ikiwiki]].