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Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

(jsomers.net)
303 points FigurativeVoid | 2 comments | 14 Oct 24 18:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.406s | source
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merryocha ◴[15 Oct 24 12:46 UTC] No.41847997[source]▶
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 debate over the definition of knowledge which you could debate forever, and that's exactly what they were doing - arguing about the definition of knowledge, one 30-page paper at a time.
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artursapek ◴[15 Oct 24 12:56 UTC] No.41848090[source]▶
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.
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1. Maxatar ◴[15 Oct 24 17:38 UTC] No.41850995[source]▶
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.

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2. artursapek ◴[16 Oct 24 13:22 UTC] No.41858763[source]▶
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.