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Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

jsomers.net

121–130 of 222 posts

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#121

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…

You're view is more inline with the philosophy of science which holds nothing an ever be justified. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Karl_Popper read The problem of induction and demarcation: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Falsifiability Basically to some it all up because we aren't "omniscient" nothing can in actuallity ever be known.

Does the philosophy of science theorize anything about the end or limits of science and knowledge? I find that topic fascinating.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#122
post #113

After Godel published his landmark incompleteness proof, that a logical system can't be complete and also without any internal inconsistencies, I would have expected this to trickle into philosophical arguments of this type. I see no practical usefulness in all of these examples, except as instances of the rule that you can get correct results from incorrect reasoning.

Philosophy is quite far away from pure math for Godel's argument to really matter.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#123
post #116
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's remarkable how LLMs have skipped any kind of philosophical grounding for "how do we know that this output is valid?" and just gone straight to "looks good to me". Very postmodernist. Also why LLMs are going to turn us into a low-trust society. A tool for filling the fields with papier-mache cows.

The scary thing is excellent advances in all the other AI/ML need to fake people: text to speech and back, yolo, video generation. The illusion might become the reality. We need a few generations to die (100 years time?) before we will shake of this need to even be human! Who is going to say no to a perfect memory implant. Now a never get dementia implant. And so on! Finally what is the cow even?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#124

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…

You're view is more inline with the philosophy of science which holds nothing an ever be justified. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Karl_Popper read The problem of induction and demarcation: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Falsifiability Basically to some it all up because we aren't "omniscient" nothing can in actuallity ever be known.

Is 1=1 disputed in philosophy of science?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#125
post #113

After Godel published his landmark incompleteness proof, that a logical system can't be complete and also without any internal inconsistencies, I would have expected this to trickle into philosophical arguments of this type. I see no practical usefulness in all of these examples, except as instances of the rule that you can get correct results from incorrect reasoning.

Philosophy is quite far away from pure math for Godel's argument to really matter.

Why though? You lose quite a bit of credibility when you say that theorems that apply to any system of logic don't apply to you in any way.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#126

Physics has kinda-solved what it means to know something. - JTB is not enough, for something to be “true” it needs _testability_. In other words, make a prediction from your knowledge-under-test which would be novel information (for example, “we’ll find fresh cow dung in the field”). - nothing is really ever considered “true”, there’s only theories that describe reality increasingly correctly In fact, physics did awa…

> JTB is not enough, for something to be “true” it needs _testability_

How could something become true in the first place such that it could be tested to discover that it is true, if the test precedes and is a condition for truth?

Do you have tests I can run on each of your many assertions here that prove their truth?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#127
post #34

Gettier cases tell us something interesting about truth and knowledge. This is that a factual claim should depict the event that was the effective cause of the claim being made. Depiction is a picturing relationship: a correspondence between the words and a possible event (eg a cow in a field). Knowledge is when the depicted event was the effective cause of the belief. Since the paper mache cow was the cause of the b…

Mathematicians already explored exactly what you describe: this is the difference between classical logic and intuitionistic logic: In classical logic statements can be true in and of themselves even if there as no proof of it, but in intuitionistic logic statements are true only if there is a proof of it: the proof is the cause for the statement to be true. In intuitionistic logic, things are not as simple as "eithe…

It is a fascinating topic. I spent a few hours on it once. I remember vaguely that the logic is very configurable and you had a lot of choices. Like you choose law of excluded middle or not I think, and things like that depending on your taste or problem. I might be wrong it was 8 years ago and I spent a couple of weeks reading about it.

Also no suprise the rabbit hole came from Haskell where those types (huh) are attracted to this more.foundational theory of computation.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Precisely, but I think the feeling of knowing may be defined differently for the person having the feeling and from the viewpoint of others. A flat-earther may feel they "know" the earth is flat. I feel that i "know" that their feeling isn't "true" knowledge. This is the simple case where we all (in this forum, or at least I hope so) agree. If we consider controversial beliefs, such as the existence of God, where Cov…

Many great points!

I thought this was interesting:

> Instead, I see the ability to "know" something as a characteristic of the human brain. It's an ability that causes the brain to lock onto one belief and disregard all others. It appears to be tendency we all have, which means it's probably evolved by evolution due to providing some evolutionary advantage.

It is substantially hardware (the brain) and software (the culturally conditioned mind).

Rewind 100 years and consider what most people "knew" that black people were. Now, consider what most people nowadays "know" black people are not. So, definitely an improvement in my opinion, but if we can ever get our heads straight about racial matters I think we'll be well on our way to the second enlightenment.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#130
The problem is the word "know" being overloaded.

First person know is belief. To some extent: this is just faith! Yes we have faith that the laws of physics wont change tomorrow, or we remember yesterday happened etc. Science tries to push that faith close to fact by verifying the fuck out of everthing. But we will never know why anything...

The other "know" is some kind of concept of absolute truth and a coincidence that what someone belives matches this. Whether that coincidence is chance or astute observations or in the paper's case: both.

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