What Is Computer Science?

Observing the "behaviors" of software and its interactions with hardware, whether that software runs on a traditional computer, smartphone, tablet, or gaming system, is not entirely the same as observing the "behaviors" of natural phenomena like gravity, but it is a process that touches upon scientific matters all the same.  It still centers on identifying and utilizing correlations.  The difference is that the correlations at the heart of computer science are between events in the physical hardware designed to run programs and events in the software it is intended to run.

Computer science reduces down to the creation and use of artificial computer systems, with the laws of physics used to design the physical hardware and the software being a technological construct.  In other words, it builds on the laws of nature found in the natural world (scientific laws like those involved in electricity and gravity) in order to invent additional "laws of nature."  Digital technologies feature their own empirical laws governing how hardware and software interact, but they are not solely discovered by rational reflection of empirical observations; they are at least in part brought into being by humans themselves.

Of course, computer science is also subject to the same limitations as the scientific study of the natural world: inductive reasoning (extrapolating from one event to another), scientific uniformitarianism (the belief that scientific laws remain constant at all points in time), and naive realism (the belief that one's sensory perceptions must match the true external world) are all fallacious, invalid philosophical stances.  The observational side of all branches of science can never escape skepticism about the exact overlap between sensory perceptions and external stimuli.

Nonetheless, computer science is an integral part of modern life--even people who are not familiar with the phrase likely rely on computer technology of some sort for their jobs and for communication--as well as a subject that is of some philosophical importance for a variety of reasons.  One is that the relationship between hardware and software somewhat mirrors the relationship between the human body and mind (consciousness), but the focus here, the fact that computer science is the human manipulation of scientific laws to create new scientific laws of human origin, is unprecedented.