←back to thread

Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

(jsomers.net)
303 points FigurativeVoid | 3 comments | 14 Oct 24 18:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.616s | source
Show context
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.
replies(3): >>41848090 #>>41849189 #>>41850323 #
feoren ◴[15 Oct 24 16:33 UTC] No.41850323[source]▶
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 said this, and Searle said that." "... so, what's the answer?" "I just told you." So if you want to actually argue about something, you argue about definitions.
replies(1): >>41850514 #
goatlover ◴[15 Oct 24 16:50 UTC] No.41850514[source]▶
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 really don't. There's all sorts of problems with the meaning of our words when examined closely.

For example, it feels like we have free will to many people, but the meaning is hard to pin down, and there are all sorts of arguments for and against that experience of being able to freely choose. And what that implies for things like punishment and responsibility. It's not simply an argument over words, it's an argument over something important to the human experience.

replies(2): >>41850703 #>>41853260 #
1. mistermann ◴[15 Oct 24 21:23 UTC] No.41853260[source]▶
> 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.

replies(1): >>41853717 #
2. goatlover ◴[15 Oct 24 22:21 UTC] No.41853717[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>41858734 #
3. mistermann ◴[16 Oct 24 13:17 UTC] No.41858734[source]▶
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.