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Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

jsomers.net

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Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#131

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…

Testability as you describe it seems to give you more than just knowledge, but also some amount of understanding: understanding of consequences (not necessarily understanding of causes) — you mentioned the ability to make predictions about the consequences of actions (e.g. 'tests'). (Aside: it seems that you can say you know something, it's a narrow enough concept to be sharp, while understanding something can only ever be true to a degree: it's broad without limit!)

But you may have conflated 'testability' and 'tested'. Can I know there is a cow in the field if I don't check? Seeing it was already evidence, testing just collects more evidence, so how can that matter? Should we set a certainty threshold on knowledge? Could be reasonable.

Maybe prediction-making is too strong to be necessary for 'knowing', if we allow knowing some fact in a domain of knowledge of which you're otherwise clueless. Although very reasonable to not call this knowledge. Suppose I learn of an mathematical theorem in a field that's so unfamiliar that I can't collect evidence to independently gain confidence in it.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goo…

In certain geographic regions of the planet at least.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#133
post #73
post #28

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.

I don't understand the Gettier problem. The example of the cow for example: You do not have a justified belief there is a cow there, all you can justify is that there is the likeness of a cow there. To be able to claim there is a cow there requires additional evidence.

> You do not have a justified belief there is a cow there, all you can justify is that there is the likeness of a cow there.

Is this assertion not self-refuting though?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#134
[Among the problems with] Justifed True Beliefs being "knowledge" is that humans are very bad at accurately stating their beliefs, and when they state those beliefs, they often adopt the inaccurate statement as the actual belief.

Let's take the obscured cow example. Nobody outside the confines of a philosophy experiment believes that there is a cow in the field. They believe that they see something which looks like a cow (this is justified and true) and they also believe, based on past evidence, that what they are seeing is a cow (this is justified but not, in this special case, true.) But if you play this joke on them repeatedly, they will start to require motion, sound, or a better look at the cow shaped object before assigning a high likelihood of there being an actual cow in the field that they are observing. They will also ask you how you are arranging for the real cow to always be conveniently obscured by the fake cow.

Unsurprisingly, gaining additional evidence can change our beliefs.

The phenomenon of a human gaining object permanence is literally the repeated updating of prior possibility estimations until we have a strong base estimation that things do not cease to exist when we stop observing them. It happens to all of us early on. (Bayes' Theorem is a reasonable approximation of mental processes here. Don't conclude that it accurately describes everything.)

The papier-mache cow simulation is not something we normally encounter, and hypothesizing it every time is a needless multiplication of entities... until you discover that there is a philosophical jokester building cow replicas. Then it becomes a normal part of your world to have cow statues and cows in fields.

Now, software engineering:

We hold models in our brains of how the software system works (or isn't working). All models are wrong, some are useful. When your model is accurate, you can make good predictions about what is wrong or what needs to be changed in the code or build environment in order to produce a desired change in software behavior. But the model is not always accurate, because we know:

- the software system is changed by other people - the software system has bugs (because it is non-trivial) - even if the software system is the same as our last understanding of it, we do not hold all parts of the model in our brains at the same weights. A part that we are not currently considering can have effects on the behaviour we are trying to change.

Eventually we gain the meta-belief that whatever we are poking is not actually fixed until we have tested it thoroughly in practice... and that we may have introduced some other bug in the process.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#135
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If philosophy was just about logic, it would be called math, wouldn't it.

But it's also about fuzzy stuff which doesn't follow the A or not A logic.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#136
post #134

[Among the problems with] Justifed True Beliefs being "knowledge" is that humans are very bad at accurately stating their beliefs, and when they state those beliefs, they often adopt the inaccurate statement as the actual belief. Let's take the obscured cow example. Nobody outside the confines of a philosophy experiment believes that there is a cow in the field. They believe that they see something which looks like a…

Bayes theorem isnt a reasonable approximation, because it isnt answering the question -- it describes what you do when you have the answer.

With bayes, you're computing P(Model|Evidence) -- but this doesnt explain where Model comes from or why Evidence is relevant to model.

If you compute P(AllPossibleModels|AllSensoryInput) you end up never learning anything.

What's happening with animals is that we have a certain, deterministic, non-bayesian primitive model of our bodies from which we can build more complex models.

So we engage in causal reasoning, not bayesian updating: P(EvidenceCausedByMyBody| do(ActionOfMyBody)) * P(Model|Evidence)

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably only inasmuch as 1 is a theoretical framework. While 1*N dollars is nice to have, I'd probably have more dollars without fractional rounding.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#139
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Godel's theorem is irrelevant to systems of concepts, conceptual analysis, or theorising in general. It's narrowly about technical issues in logic.

It has been "thematically appropriated" by a certain sort of pop-philosophy, but it says nothing relevant.

Philosophy isnt the activity of trying to construct logical embeddings in deductive proofs. If any one ever thought so, then there's some thin sort of relevance, but no one ever has.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#140
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Note that Gödel's incompleteness theorems do not apply to just any system of logic: they are about particular formal systems that can prove certain facts about the arithmetics of integers. So, for them to fail, it doesn't even take a non-mathematical formal system, just something that has nothing to do with natural numbers, for example, Euclidean geometry, which happens to be fully decidable.
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