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Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

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Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#21

Post by abeppu »

jayd16 wrote: post #7

Hmm, are there better cases that disprove JTB? Couldn't one argue that the reliance on a view that can't tell papermache from a cow is simply not a justified belief? Is the crux of the argument that justification is an arbitrary line and ultimately insufficient?

I like the example of seeing a clock as you walk past. It says it's 2:30. You believe that the time is 2:30. That seems like a perfectly reasonable level of justification -- you looked at a clock and read the time. If unbeknownst to you, that clock is broken and stuck at 2:30, but you also just happened to walk by and read it at 2:30, then do you "know" that it's 2:30?

I think a case can't so much "disprove" JTB, so much as illustrate that adopting a definition of knowledge is more complex than you might naively believe.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#22

Post by mistermann »

barrystaes wrote: post #12
barrystaes wrote: post #11

Well this is a roundabout way of justified thinking about a belief that just happens to align with some actual facts..

On a more serious note: populist politicians seem to like making gettier claims; they cost a lot of time to refute and are free publicity. Aka the worst kind of fake news.

A rather ambitious claim considering the context!

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#23

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

> true, because it doesn't make sense to "know" a falsehoood

That's a problem right there. Maybe that made sense to the Greeks, but it definitely doesn't make any sense in the 21st century. "Knowing" falsehoods is something we broadly acknowledge that we all do.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#24

Post by JohnMakin »

JackFr wrote: post #17
JohnMakin wrote: post #5

I wasn’t aware there was a term for this or that this was not common knowledge - for me I refer to them as “if I fix this, it will break EVERYTHING” cases that come up in my particular line of work frequently, and my peers generally tend to understand as well. Cause/effect in complex symptoms is of course itself complex, which is why the first thing I typically do in any environment is set up metrics and monitoring.…

I’ve come across (possibly written) code that upon close examination seems to only work accidentally — that there are real failures which are somehow hidden by behavior of other systems. The classic and oft heard “How did this ever work?”

I think this stuff is really funny when I find it and I have a whole list of funniest bugs like this I have found. Particularly when I get into dealing with proxies and reponse/error handling between backend systems and frontend clients - sometimes the middle layer has been silently handling errors forever, in a way no one understood, or the client code has adapted to them in a way where fixing it will break things badly - big systems naturally evolve in this way and can take a long time to ever come to a head. When it does, that’s when I try to provide consulting, lol.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#25

Post by throwup238 »

K0balt wrote: post #6
CleverLikeAnOx wrote: post #4

An old timer I worked with during my first internship called these kinds of issues "the law of coincidental failures" and I took it to heart. I try a lot of obvious things when debugging to ascertain the truth. Like, does undoing my entire change fix the bug?

Yeah, good times. I just recently had one that was a really strong misdirection, ended up being 2 simultaneous other, non related things that conspired to make it look convincingly like my code was not doing what it was supposed to. I even wrote tests to see if I had found a corner-case compiler bug or some broken library code. I was half way through opening an issue on the library when the real culprit became appare…

The joys of modbus PLCs, I take it?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#26

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

namuol wrote: post #13

I always come back to this saying: “Debugging is the art of figuring out which of your assumptions are wrong.” (Attribution unknown)

As long as "your assumptions" includes "I know what I am doing", then OK.

But most people tend not to include that in the "your assumptions" list, and frequently it is the source of the bug.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#27

Post by eynsham »

dherls wrote: post #16
jayd16 wrote: post #7

Hmm, are there better cases that disprove JTB? Couldn't one argue that the reliance on a view that can't tell papermache from a cow is simply not a justified belief? Is the crux of the argument that justification is an arbitrary line and ultimately insufficient?

I was thinking that one solution might be to specify that the "justification" also has to be a justified true belief. In this case, the justification that you see a cow isn't true, so it isn't a JTB. Of course that devolves rapidly into trying to find the "base case" of knowledge that are inherent

This and many other suggestions have been explored, and usually found wanting (see e.g. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#NoFal...).

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#28

Post by rhelz »

The impossibility of solving the Gettier problem meshes nicely with the recent trend to Baysianism and Pragmatism. Instead of holding out for justified true belief and "Bang-Bang" either labeling them True or False, give them degrees of belief which are most useful for prediction and control.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#29

Post by n4r9 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23

> true, because it doesn't make sense to "know" a falsehoood That's a problem right there. Maybe that made sense to the Greeks, but it definitely doesn't make any sense in the 21st century. "Knowing" falsehoods is something we broadly acknowledge that we all do.

Could you elaborate what you mean by that?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#30

Post by JadeNB »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #23

> true, because it doesn't make sense to "know" a falsehoood That's a problem right there. Maybe that made sense to the Greeks, but it definitely doesn't make any sense in the 21st century. "Knowing" falsehoods is something we broadly acknowledge that we all do.

> That's a problem right there. Maybe that made sense to the Greeks, but it definitely doesn't make any sense in the 21st century. "Knowing" falsehoods is something we broadly acknowledge that we all do.

I think the philosophical claim is that, when we think we know something, and the thing that we turns out to be false, what has happened isn't that we knew something false, but rather that we didn't actually know the thing in the first place. That is, not our knowledge, but our belief that we had knowledge, was mistaken.

(Of course, one can say that we did after all know it in any conventional sense of the word, and that such a distinction is at the very best hair splitting. But philosophy is willing to split hairs however finely reason can split them ….)

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