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Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

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Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#81

Post by paganel »

naasking wrote: post #74
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.

False propositions are not knowledge, only true propositions are knowledge. Therefore you cannot know something true that is actually false, you can only believe something true that is actually false. Precisely describing how one moves from belief to knowledge is exactly what epistemology is about.

> False propositions are not knowledge, only true propositions are knowledge.

This is something that a lot of Greeks would have had issues with, most probably Heraclitus, and Protagoras for sure. Restricting ourselves to Aristotelian logic back in the day has been extremely limiting, so much so that a lot of modern philosophers cannot even comprehends how it is to look outside that logic.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#82

Post by tucnak »

codeulike wrote: post #9

“I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

I often wonder if LLMs would have made Wittgenstein cry...

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#83

Post by orbisvicis »

mannykannot wrote: post #67
recursive wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you never believed that in the first place?

Then, to be consistent, you should not trust either your deductions or even your choice of axioms. In other words, it looks like a form of solipsism.

You can not know what you are doing and still trust in logic.

But what world it would be if you could flip a coin on any choice and still survive! If the world didn't follow any self-consistent logic, like a Roger Zelazny novel, that would be fantastic. Not sure that qualifies as solipsism, but still. Would society even be possible? Or even life?

Here, as long as you follow cultural norms, every choice has pretty good outcomes.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#84

Post by throw310822 »

naasking wrote: post #74
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.

False propositions are not knowledge, only true propositions are knowledge. Therefore you cannot know something true that is actually false, you can only believe something true that is actually false. Precisely describing how one moves from belief to knowledge is exactly what epistemology is about.

> False propositions are not knowledge, only true propositions are knowledge

From my point of view, "to know" is a subjective feeling, an assessment on the degree of faith we put on a statement. "Knowledge" instead is an abstract concept, a corpus of statements, similar to "science". People "know" false stuff all the time (for some definition of "true" and "false", which may also vary).

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#85

Post by throw310822 »

kragen wrote: post #44
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.

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.

And, do they know if their definition is the right one? And how do they know it? And, is it actually true?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#86

Post by throw310822 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #38
n4r9 wrote: post #29

Earlier 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).

> In every sense it is a justified belief that happens to be false

Not to mention what does it even mean for something to be false. For the hypothetical savage the knowledge that the moon is a piece of cheese just beyond reach is as true as it is for me the knowledge that it's a celestial body 300k km away. Both statements are false for the engineer that needs to land a probe there (the distance varies and 300k km is definitely wrong).

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#87

Post by jumping_frog »

orbisvicis wrote: post #78

I'm not sure I see the big deal. Justification is on a scale of 0 to 1, and at 1 you are onmiscient. We live in a complicated world; no one has time to be God so you just accept your 0.5 JTB and move on. Or for the belief part, well, "it's not a lie if you believe it". And as for the true bit, let's assume that there really is a cow, but before you can call someone over to verify your JTB, an alien abducts the cow an…

Biology makes it even more complicated. If you see your mother, you consider her to be imposter. While if you hear your mother's voice, you consider her to be real.

Ramachandran Capgras Delusion Case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xczrDAGfT4

> On the flip side, even if the knowledge is wrong, if everyone agrees it is true, does it even matter?

This is case of consensus reality (an intuition pump I borrowed from somewhere). Consensus reality is also respected in Quantum realm.

https://youtu.be/vSnq5Hs3_wI?t=753

while individual particles remain in quantum superposition, their relative positions create a collective consensus in the entanglement network. This consensus defines the structure of macroscopic objects, making them appear well-defined to observers, including Schrödinger's cat.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#88

Post by tottenhm »

I enjoy this metaphor of the cow and the papier-mâché.

Presumably, there is a farmer who raised the cow, then purchased the papier-mâché, then scrounged for a palette of paints, and meticulously assembled everything in a field -- all for the purpose of entertaining distant onlookers.

That is software engineering. In Gettier's story, we're not the passive observers. We're the tricksters who thought papier-mâché was a good idea.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#89

Post by yldedly »

orbisvicis wrote: post #80
orbisvicis wrote: post #78

I'm not sure I see the big deal. Justification is on a scale of 0 to 1, and at 1 you are onmiscient. We live in a complicated world; no one has time to be God so you just accept your 0.5 JTB and move on. Or for the belief part, well, "it's not a lie if you believe it". And as for the true bit, let's assume that there really is a cow, but before you can call someone over to verify your JTB, an alien abducts the cow an…

edit : Then there's the whole "what is a cow" thing. Like if you you stuffed a cow carcass with a robot and no one could tell the difference, would that still be a cow? Or what if you came across a horrifying cow-horse hybrid, what would you call that? Or if the cow in question had a unique mutation possessed by no other cow - does it still fit the cow archetype? For example, what if the cow couldn't produce milk? Or…

You've called J and T into question, so let's do B as well. Physicists know that QM and relativity can't be true, so it's fair to say that they don't believe in these theories, in a naive sense at least. In general anyone who takes Box' maxim that all models are wrong (but some are useful) to heart, doesn't fully believe in any straightforward sense. But clearly we'd say physicists do have knowledge.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#90

Post by orbisvicis »

FigurativeVoid wrote: post #62
hamandcheese wrote: post #42

I 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.

I have similar belief, but only when it comes to bugs that make me look foolish. The more likely a bug is to make me look dumb, it will only appear as soon as I ask for help.

The bugs that always disappear when I try to demonstrate them to others - my favorite. Reminds me of the "Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine" koan. This is largely true, but I remember a failing piece of authentication hardware that I didn't understand but was convinced was failing. Every time I called someone over it would work, so I couldn't get it replaced. Eventually the failure rate got so high that everyone agreed the damn thing had failed, "dead as a brick". But until then I was SoL. What are the chances that something 99% towards "dead as a brick" would always work around a superior.
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