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Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

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Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#211

Post by mistermann »

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…

> Science doesn't prove things, it provides empirical support for or against theories.

There's been some progress science must have missed out on then:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8207024/

That is one organization, many others claim they've also achieved the impossible.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#212

Post by goatlover »

mistermann wrote: post #211
goatlover wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Science doesn't prove things, it provides empirical support for or against theories. There's been some progress science must have missed out on then: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8207024/ That is one organization, many others claim they've also achieved the impossible.

Since this is a discussion on philosophy in the context of knowledge and metaphysics, scientific organizations don't claim they provide proof (in the sense of logic and truth), rather they provide rigorous scientific evidence to support their claims, such as vaccines not causing autism. But science is always subject to future revision if more evidence warrants it. There is no truth in the 100% certainty sense or having reached some final stage of knowledge. The world can always turn out to be different than we think. This is certainly true in the messy and complex fields of biology and medicine.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#213

Post by K0balt »

foobarian wrote: post #60
K0balt wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

> corner-case compiler bug They say never to blame the compiler, and indeed it's pretty much never the compiler. But DNS on the other hand... :-)

Yeah, it’s basically never the compiler. That’s how you know you are truly desperate… when you think you’ve eliminated everything else lol.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#214

Post by ars »

rhelz wrote: post #209
ars wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cow example is a confusing example; I like the clock example much better. You are in a school building, with hundreds of classrooms, and there is a clock on each wall. All of the clocks are working perfectly, except for one classroom where the clock is stuck at 2:02. Every other time you've been in that school building, the clocks have shown you the right time, so you feel very confident that the clocks on the wa…

> In order to count as knowledge, it has to be justified in the right way, which, alas, nobody has been able to specify exactly what that way should be.

First of all you have to be able to test your knowledge, you would test that the clock is correct for every minute of the day. If you missed any minutes then your knowledge is incomplete, you instead have probable knowledge, (using the same methods that physics uses to decide if an experimental result is real, you can assign a probability that the clock is correct).

Also, since when is knowledge absolute? You can never be completely certain about any knowledge, you can only assign (or try to assign) a probability that you know something, and testing your belief greatly increases the probability.

(PS. Thank you for the reply.)

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#215

Post by thewileyone »

Recently experienced this. Business users were reporting an issue in a system and were demanding an bug-fix. After reviewing their observations and stepping through the issue together, turns out the root cause was something completely unexpected that was in the background.

Saved the tech team time chasing from a wild goose.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#216

Post by mistermann »

goatlover wrote: post #212
mistermann wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Science doesn't prove things, it provides empirical support for or against theories. There's been some progress science must have missed out on then: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8207024/ That is one organization, many others claim they've also achieved the impossible.

Since this is a discussion on philosophy in the context of knowledge and metaphysics, scientific organizations don't claim they provide proof (in the sense of logic and truth), rather they provide rigorous scientific evidence to support their claims, such as vaccines not causing autism. But science is always subject to future revision if more evidence warrants it. There is no truth in the 100% certainty sense or havi…

Your claims are demonstrably false, there are many instances of authoritative organizations that explicitly and literally assert that vaccines do not cause autism.

Out of curiosity, can you realize I am arguing from a much more advantageous position, in that I only have to find one exception to your popular "scientific organizations don't claim" meme (which I (and also you) can directly query on Google, and find numerous instances from numerous organizations), whereas you would have had to undertaken a massive review of all communications (and many forms of phrasing) from these groups, something we both know you have not done?

A (portion of) the (I doubt intentional or malicious) behavior is described here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

I believe the flaw in scientists (and their fan base) behavior is mainly (but not entirely) a manifestation of a defect in our culture, which is encoded within our minds, which drives our behavior. Is this controversial from an abstract perspective?

It is possible to dig even deeper in our analysis here to make it even more inescapable (though not undeniable) what is going on here, with a simple series of binary questions ("Is it possible that...") that expand the context. I'd be surprised if you don't regularly utilize this form of thinking when it comes to debugging computers systems.

Heck, I'm not even saying this is necessarily bad policy, sometimes deceit is literally beneficial, and this seems like a prime scenario for it. If I was in power, I wouldn't be surprised if I too would take the easy way out, at least in the short term.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#217

Post by artursapek »

Maxatar wrote: post #199
artursapek wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right but merely what time two events occurred doesn’t seem like enough to “justify” a belief. It can be a suspicion but that’s about it.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#218

Post by mannykannot »

kragen wrote: post #197
mannykannot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cons…

Gettier clauses can be readily understood as a response to the conventional starting point for epistemology: the position that having knowledge is a matter of having a justified belief in a true proposition (often abbreviated to JTB.) (This really only concerns propositional knowledge, as opposed to, for example, knowing how to ride a bicycle.)

To know something in this sense seems to require several things: firstly, that the relevant proposition is true, which is independent of one's state of mind (not everyone agrees, but that is another issue...) Secondly, it seems to require that one knows what the relevant proposition is, which is a state of mind. Thirdly, having a belief that it is true, which is also a state of mind.

If we left it at that, there's no clear way to find out which propositions are true, at least for those that are not clearly true a priori (and even then, 'clearly' is problematic except in trivial cases, but that is yet another issue...) Having a justification for our belief gives us confidence that what we believe to be true actually is (though it rarely gives us certainty.)

But what, then, is justification? If we take the truth of the proposition alone as its justification, we get stuck in an epistemic loop. I think you are right if you are suggesting that good justifications are often in the form of causal arguments, but by taking that position, we are casting justification as being something like knowledge: having a belief that an argument about causes (or anything else, for that matter) is sound, rather than a belief that a proposition states a fact - but having a justified belief in an argument involves knowing that its premises are correct...

It is beginning to look like tortoises all the way down (as in Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles".)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achi...

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#219

Post by onursurme »

Today, I encountered an issue where the modal's close button appeared to be unresponsive. Upon reviewing the modal and the button, everything seemed to be set up correctly, yet clicking the button didn’t close the modal. I later realized that multiple instances of the same modal had been opened. When I clicked the close button, only the topmost modal closed, leaving the others still visible underneath.

Re: Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

#220

Post by tucnak »

osullivj wrote: post #182
tucnak wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Suspect not as later Wittgenstein tells us "the meaning is the use"; don't look at the dictionary definition, look at many examples. And that's what LLMs do.

Tears of joy!
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