Oh this is such a better and more useful idea than some other common ones like “yak shaving” or DRY
Love it
Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
41–50 of 222 posts
Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
#42I believe that schrodinger's cat also applies to software bugs. Every time I go looking, I find bugs that I don't believe existed until I observed them.
Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Ah, yes. But a roll- your own device with C++ on bare metal, so lots more fun.
(we’ll need a few thousand of these, and the off the shelf solution is around 1k vs $1.50 for RYO )
By the way, the RISC V espressif esp32-C3 is a really amazing device for Color me favorably impressed with this platform.
Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
#44> 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.
No, I think many people use a definition of "know" that doesn't include "knowing" falsehoods. Possibly you and they have fundamentally beliefs about the nature of reality, or possibly you are just using different definitions for the same word.
Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate what you mean by that?
We all carry around multiple falsehoods in our heads that we are convinced are true for a variety of reasons. To say that this is not "knowing" is (as another commenter noted) hair-splitting of the worst kind. In every sense it is a justified belief that happens to be false (we just do not know that yet).
What exactly does it mean to know something then? As distinct from believing it. Just the justification, and then, I guess it doesn't have to be a very good justification if it can be wrong?
Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
#46Gettier cases are fun, although the infinite regress argument is a much clearer way to show that JTB is a false epistemology.
Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The problem with the hair splitting is that it requires differentiating between different brain states over time where the only difference is the content. On Jan 1 2024 I "know" X. Time passes. On Jan 1 2028, I "know" !X. In both cases, there is (a) something it is like to "know" either X or !X (b) discernible brain states the correspond to "knowing" either X or !X and that are distinct from "knowing" neither Thus, e…
Maybe the people who use "know" in the way you don't are talking about something other than brain states or qualia. There are lots of propositions like this; if I say, "I fathered Alston", that may be true or false for reasons that are independent of my brain state. Similarly with "I will get home tomorrow before sunset". It may be true or false; I can't actually tell. The same is true of the proposition "I know there are coins in the pocket of the fellow who will get the job", if by "know" we mean something other than a brain state, something we can't directly observe.
You evidently want to use the word "know" exclusively to describe a brain state, but many people use it to mean a different thing. Those people are the ones who are having this debate. It's true that you can render this debate, like any debate, into nonsense by redefining the terms they are using, but that in itself doesn't mean that it's inherently nonsense.
Maybe you're making the ontological claim that your beliefs about X don't actually become definitely true or false until you have a way to tell the difference? A sort of solipsistic or idealistic worldview? But you seem to reject that claim in your last sentence, saying, "it is only the knowledge itself that is false."
Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
#48I always come back to this saying: “Debugging is the art of figuring out which of your assumptions are wrong.” (Attribution unknown)
I always thought of what I learned in some philosophy class, that there are only two ways to generate a contradiction.
One way is to reason from a false premise, or as I would put it, something we think is true is not true.
The other way is to mix logical levels (“this sentence is false”).
I don’t think I ever encountered a bug from mixing logical levels, but the false premise was a common culprit.
Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What if you never believed that in the first place?
Then you're good to ignore that as a possible source of the problem.
Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with the hair splitting is that it requires differentiating between different brain states over time where the only difference is the content. On Jan 1 2024 I "know" X. Time passes. On Jan 1 2028, I "know" !X. In both cases, there is (a) something it is like to "know" either X or !X (b) discernible brain states the correspond to "knowing" either X or !X and that are distinct from "knowing" neither Thus, e…
Maybe the people who use "know" in the way you don't are talking about something other than brain states or qualia. There are lots of propositions like this; if I say, "I fathered Alston", that may be true or false for reasons that are independent of my brain state. Similarly with "I will get home tomorrow before sunset". It may be true or false; I can't actually tell. The same is true of the proposition "I know ther…
"I know I fathered Alston" .. the reasons it may be true or false are indeed independent of brain state. But "knowing" is not about whether it is true or false, otherwise this whole question becomes tautological.
If someone is just going to say "It is not possible to know false things", then sure, by that definition of "know" any brain state that involves a justified belief in a thing that is false is not "knowing".
But I consider that a more or less useless definition of "knowing" in context of both Gettier and TFA.