ON COMPUTER SCIENCE AS “PROCEDURAL EPISTEMOLOGY”

While it is unlikely that the premise of a “computer science” would prompt any confusion or controversy today, perhaps it should. Following nearly two decades of anxiety over the status of this discipline, an influential textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1980), declared that computer science “is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers.” The proposed alternative – that it should instead be thought of as an elaboration of “procedural epistemology” – marks the tensions between artisanal and theoretical labor in which the activity of computer programming established its institutional legitimacy.