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Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

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303 points FigurativeVoid | 4 comments | 14 Oct 24 18:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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orbisvicis ◴[15 Oct 24 05:19 UTC] No.41845194[source]▶
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 and leaves a crop circle. Now all anyone sees is a paper-mache cow so you appear the fool but did have a true JTB - Schroedinger's JTB. Does it really matter unless you can convince others of that? On the flip side, even if the knowledge is wrong, if everyone agrees it is true, does it even matter?

JTB only exist to highlight bad assumptions, like being on the wrong side of a branch predictor. If you have a 0.9 JTB but get the right answer 0.1 times and don't update you assumptions, then you have a problem. One statue in a field? Not a big deal! *

* Unless it's a murder investigation and you're Sherlock Holmes (a truly powerful branch predictor).

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orbisvicis ◴[15 Oct 24 05:30 UTC] No.41845236[source]▶
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 was created in lab? Which features are required to inherit cow-ness? This is an ambiguity covered by language, too. For example, "cow" is a pejorative not necessarily referring to a bovine animal.

edit: And also the whole "is knowledge finite or infinite?". Is there ever a point at which we can explain everything, science ends and we can rest on our laurels? What then? Will we spend our time explaining hypotheticals that don't exist? Pure theoretical math? Or can that end too?

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yldedly ◴[15 Oct 24 06:20 UTC] No.41845487[source]▶
You've called J and T into question, so let's do B as well. Physicists know that QM and relativity can't be true, so it's fair to say that they don't believe in these theories, in a naive sense at least. In general anyone who takes Box' maxim that all models are wrong (but some are useful) to heart, doesn't fully believe in any straightforward sense. But clearly we'd say physicists do have knowledge.
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1. Maxatar ◴[15 Oct 24 17:53 UTC] No.41851143[source]▶
Sure we'd say physicists have knowledge of quantum mechanics and general relativity. And we can also say physicists have knowledge of how to make predictions using quantum mechanics and general relativity. In this sense, general relativity is no more wrong than a hammer is wrong. Relativity is simply a tool that a person can use to make predictions. Strictly speaking then relativity is not itself right or wrong, rather it's the person who uses relativity to predict things who can be right or wrong. If a person uses general relativity incorrectly, which can be done by applying it to an area where it's not able to make predictions such as in the quantum domain, then it's the person who uses relativity as a tool who is wrong, not relativity itself.

As a matter of linguistic convenience, it's easier to say that relativity (or theory X) is right means that people who use relativity to make predictions make correct predictions as opposed to relativity itself being correct or incorrect.

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2. yldedly ◴[15 Oct 24 19:27 UTC] No.41852198[source]▶
My point is that QM and GR make very different claims about what exists. Perhaps it's possible to unify the descriptions. But more likely there will be a new theory with a completely different description of reality.

On small scales, GR and Newtonian mechanics make almost the same predictions, but make completely different claims about what exists in reality. In my view, if the theories made equally good predictions, but still differed so fundamentally about what exists, then that matters, and implies that at least one of the theories is wrong. This is more a realist, than an instrumentalist position, which perhaps is what you subscribe to, but tbh instrumentalism always seemed indefensible to me.

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3. Maxatar ◴[15 Oct 24 19:49 UTC] No.41852412[source]▶
If you are aware that "Maxatar's conjecture is that 1 + 1 = 5", then it's correct to say that you have knowledge about "Maxatar's conjecture", regardless of whether the conjecture is actually true or false. Your knowledge is that there is some conjecture that 1 + 1 = 5, not that it's actually true.

In that sense, it's also correct to say that physicists have knowledge of relativity and quantum mechanics. I don't think any physicist including Einstein himself thinks that either theory is actually true, but they do have knowledge of both theories in much the same way that one has knowledge of "Maxatar's conjecture" and in much the way that you have knowledge of what the flat Earth proposition is, despite them being false.'

It seems fairly radical to believe that instrumentalism is indefensible, or at least it's not clear what's indefensible about it. Were NASA physicists indefensible to use Newtonian mechanics to send a person to the moon because Newtonian mechanics are "wrong"?

What exactly is indefensible? The observation that working physicists don't really care about whether a physical theory is "real" versus trying to come up with formal descriptions of observed phenomenon to make future predictions, regardless of whether those formal descriptions are "real"?

If someone choses to engage in science by coming up with descriptions and models that are effective at communicating with other people observations, experimental results and whose results go on to allow for engineering advances in technology, are they doing something indefensible?

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4. yldedly ◴[15 Oct 24 20:26 UTC] No.41852743{3}[source]▶
Yes, it's correct to say that I have knowledge of your conjecture, and in the same way that physicists have knowledge of QM and GR regardless of their truth status, but beyond just having knowledge of the theory, they also have knowledge of the reality that the theory describes.

>Were NASA physicists indefensible to use Newtonian mechanics to send a person to the moon because Newtonian mechanics are "wrong"?

No, it was defensible, and that's exactly my point. Even though they didn't believe in the content of the theory (and ignoring the fact that they know a better theory), they do have knowledge of reality through it.

I don't think instrumentalism makes sense for reasons unrelated to this discussion. A scientist can hold instrumentalist views without being a worse scientist for it, it's a philosophical position. Basically, I think it's bad metaphysics. If you refuse to believe that the objects described by a well-established theory really exist, but you don't have any concrete experiment that falsifies it or a better theory, then to me it seems like sheer refusal to accept reality. I think people find instrumentalism appealing because they expect that any theory could be replaced by a new one that could turn out very different, and then they see it as foolish to have believed the old one, so they straight up refuse to believe or care what any theory says about reality. But you always believe something, whether you are aware of it or not, and the question is whether your beliefs are supported by evidence and logic.