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Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

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Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#191

Post by paganel »

naasking wrote: post #165
paganel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. That's arguably good. If you restrict yourself to something that you know is a valid method of ascertaining truth, then you have much higher confidence in the conclusion. The fact that we still struggle even with getting t…

That’s the thing, it only ascertains a restricted form of truth (in the case of Aristotelian logic what would be called “Aristotelian” truth), and I’m not sure you can then make the step from “Aristotelian” truth to “Heraclitean” (let’s say) truth, first, because of the sociology of science (for example everything seen as not-“Aristotelian” might be regarded by default as suss and intellectually non-touchable, just look at the bad renown Protagoras still has after 2500 years), and second, and I’m not sure how best to call it, because restricting ourselves for so long focusing on one thing and one thing only when it comes to the foundations of truth has made us “blind” to any other options/possibilities, we can not take our eyes off the cave walls and turn them towards the outside world and towards the light anymore.

And to give a concrete example related to this as a whole, people should have known that getting to know something by not knowing it more and more is a valid epistemological take, just look at Christian Orthodox Isichasm and its doctrine about God (paraphrased it goes like this: the more you are aware of the fact that you don’t know God then the more you actually know/experience God”). Christian Orthodox Isichasm is, of course, in direct connection with neo-Platonism/Plotinism, but because the neo-Platonist “doctrine” on truth has never been mathematically formalized (presuming that that would even be possible) then the scientific world chooses to ignore it and only focuses on its own restricted way of looking at truth and, in the end, of experiencing truth.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#193

Post by mjburgess »

bumby wrote: post #184
mjburgess wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be that its vastly more minimal than it appears I'm stating. I already agree with the high adaptability of the motor system -- indeed, that's a core part of my point, since its this system which does the heavy lifting of thinking. Eg., it might be that the kind of "theory" which exists is un/pre-conscious. So that it takes a long time, comparatively, for the baby to become aware of it. Until the baby has a s…

I think that makes sense as a philosophical thought, but do you think it's testable to actually tell us anything about the human condition? E.g., If motor movement and causal inference are coupled, would you expect a baby born with locked in syndrome to have a limited notion of self?

Probably one of the most important muscles is in the eye. If all the muscles of the body are paralysed from birth, yes, no concepts would develop.

This is not only testable, but central to neuroscience, and i'd claim, to any actual science of intelligence -- rather the self-aggrandising csci mumbojumbo.

On the testing side, you can lesion various parts of the sensory-motor system of mice, run them in various maze-solving experiments under various conditions (etc.) and observe their lack of ability to adapt to novel environments.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#194

Post by orbisvicis »

pelorat wrote: post #108
orbisvicis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A robot in a cow carcass is not a cow, it's a "robot in a cow carcass". Someone might believe it's a cow because they lack crucial information but that's on them, doesn't change the fact. A cow-horse hybris is not a cow, it's a cow-horse hybrid. A cow with a genetic mutation is a cow with a genetic mutation. A cow created in a lab, perhaps even grown 100% by artificial means in-vitro is of course still a cow since it…

Oh, this is a fun Gettier, with some language ambiguities, and some ship of Theseus sprinkled in! Let's say some smart-aleck travels back in time to when the English language was being developed and replaces all cows with robot cows such that current cows remain biological. So technically the word "cow" refers only to robot cows. What then?

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#195

Post by feoren »

goatlover wrote: post #190
feoren wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of philosophical arguments are actually arguments about definitions of words. You can't actually be "wrong" in philosophy -- they never prove ideas wrong and reject them (if they did, we'd just call it "science"), so it's just an ever-accumulating body of "he said, she said". If you ask a philosophical question, that's the answer you get: "well, Aristotle said this, and Kant said that, and Descartes…

Science doesn't prove things, it provides empirical support for or against theories. Philosophical ideas can be shown to be wrong if their reasoning is shown to be invalid. Words have meaning, and philosophical arguments are over the meaning of those words. The problem is there is a "loose fit between mind and world", as one contemporary philosopher put it. We naively thinks words describe the word as is, but they re…

[dead]

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#196

Post by kragen »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #50
kragen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".…

I wasn't talking about whether it was true or false that I know I fathered Alston. I didn't say anything about knowing I fathered Alston at all. I was talking about whether it was true or false that I fathered Alston, which (I hope you'll agree) is not a question of my brain state; it's a question of Alston's genetic constitution, and my brain state is entirely irrelevant.

I think that, without using a definition of "knowing" that fits the description of definitions you are declaring useless, you won't be able to make any sense of either Gettier or TFA. So, however useful or useless you may find it in other contexts, in the context of trying to understand the debate, it's a very useful family of definitions of "knowing"; it's entirely necessary to your success in that endeavor.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#197

Post by kragen »

mannykannot wrote: post #69
kragen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that it is not often helpful to to avoid the issue by redefining a term in a way not originally intended (though it may be justified if the original definition is predicated on an unjustifiable (and sometimes tacit) assumption.) Furthermore, OP’s choice of putting “know” in quotes seems to suggest that author is not using the word as conventionally understood (though, of course, orthography is not an infallib…

I think making sense of the Gettier debate does depend on using a definition of "know" that isn't just a question of what state the "knower's" brain is in. Gettier's point is not that truth isn't necessary; it's that, generally when people say "know", they are referring not only to brain states and truth, but also something else, specifically, some kind of causal connection between the two. I don't think you can construct a definition of "know" by which Gettier cases aren't "knowing" to which truth is irrelevant.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#199

Post by Maxatar »

artursapek wrote: post #147
merryocha wrote: post #143

I was a philosophy major in college and semantic quibbling over Gettier problems was popular while I was there. I have always believed that Gettier's popularity was due to the fact that the paper was only three pages, and therefore it was the only paper that the academics actually read to the end. I never thought there was anything particularly deep or noteworthy about the problem at all - it is fundamentally a debat…

I was going to say, I don’t even understand how the second example in this post is a gettier. He thought one event caused the issue to start, but a different event did instead. And they happened around the same time. Ok? This doesn’t seem very philosophical to me.

That's what a gettier is, it's when you have a justified true belief about a proposition but the justification is merely coincidental. You were still justified to believe the proposition, the proposition is still true, and so under the "justified, true, belief" model of knowledge you would be considered to have known the proposition, and yet as this example and others demonstrate, that's not really what we'd consider to be knowledge, indicating that knowledge is more than justified, true, belief.

Whether you agree or disagree is a separate matter and something you can discuss or ponder for 5 minutes. The article is about taking a somewhat interesting concept from philosophy and applying it to a routine software development scenario.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#200

Post by pugworthy »

When wondering if there was some dumb programming joke about "settiers" to go along with "getteirs" it dawned on me that there's a certain gettier nature to Get/Set encapsulation.

Suppose you've got a class library with no source, and the documentation defines a get method for some calculated value. But suppose that what the get method actually does is return an incorrectly calculated value. You're not getting the right calculated value, but you're getting a calculated value none the less. But then finally suppose that in the same code is the right calculated value in unreachable code or an undocumented method.

On the one hand, you have a justified true belief that "the getter returns a calculated value": (1) you believe the getter returns a value; (2) that belief didn't come from nowhere, but is justified by you getting values back that look exactly like calculated values; (3) and the class does, in fact, have code in it to return a correctly calculated value.

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