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Gettier Problem

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Guruthostirn
Post subject: Gettier Problem
Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 5:17 pm
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Any of you philosophers know about this? I want a bit of a discussion about it...

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Lidless
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 6:15 pm
Als u het leven te ernstig neemt, mist u de betekenis.
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There is an old management training adage:

Raw data + processing = information
Information + interpretation = knowledge
Knowledge + experience = wisdom.


So for perfect knowledge, you need perfect information and perfect interpretation.

However, in any enclosed system there is no such thing as an independent subset of that system. Everything effects everything else.

Thus there is no such thing as perfect (ie complete) information unless you have information about EVERYTHING. And if you have that, you are bigger than the system in question - a contradiction - and cannot therefore happen.

Thus any information is incomplete and all knowledge is an estimation of reality.

Bit like Schrodinger's cat. Physicists have it wrong I think. It's not that the cat exists in two states - the 'half-dead' cat is the best estimate of knowledge, of reality. It's only when the box is opened that more information is known and a better estimate of knowledge and reality is made.

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Axordil
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 6:18 pm
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Absolute empirical knowledge is impossible. All we can do is say, according to the evidence at hand, such and such is the most likely scenario--which our brains do all the time, because not doing so is counterproductive to survival. And the scenarios we build based on the evidence we can gather are alike enough to allow communication, or at least what we think is coummunication.

All of epistomology is a house of cards, since any axioms it uses are demonstrably dubious. But like the bumblebee, we keep on flying anyway...

I think absolute knowledge is possible, through personal revelation, but is not applicable outside ourselves.

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Guruthostirn
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 6:23 pm
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Not exactly the Gettier problem per se, but that's quite an insightful comment there Steve. It pokes a hole in probability assessment...which is a good thing to do.

You read Kant?

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Axordil
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 6:26 pm
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Hmmm. The only problem with the cat analogy is the Heisenberg thing--at the micro level, one cannot gather more information without distorting the results.

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Guruthostirn
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 6:35 pm
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No...that's the thing, it really indicates that an experiment like that cannot be investigated until after it's run its course. Probability is like that...and the injunction of "cannot observe without affecting" has as an offshoot that you cannot observe until the process is finished. Besides, finished product is all you really care about...probability is all about what you May end up with...

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Axordil
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 6:43 pm
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But some processes are not discrete--they are ongoing, and thus any end to the observation is arbitrarily imposed. That's not a problem usually, but if the act of ending the process also imposes a value, it is.

Silly example: if I am running an experiment to see how long I can hold on to a hot piece of metal, my decision to let go both ends the process and sets a value. Opening the box with the cat does the same thing. Saying it's finished changes an indeterminate value to one of two determinate values.

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Guruthostirn
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 6:52 pm
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Well, one could argue that an unending process like that isn't significantly valuable in the areas where observation is an issue. But at the same time, as you say, unending processes have an indeterminate variable. I suspect that Most experiments Need that variable determined for anything significant to be learned.

Maybe I'm wrong...not knowing that much about quantum physics.

There's also the holistic aspect...that it is not a problem that the observer affects the process...because the observer is inherently part of the process.

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Axordil
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 7:02 pm
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Yes, exactly--but classical physics doesn't allow for the observer to make a difference. The process was held to be a separate thing, which at the macro level it effectively is.

If you really want to see how the cat is doing, you just use a glass box, of course. :D

But back to your original question: empirically acquired knowledge is always suspect, since it goes through the filter of our senses. Part of the Gettier problem is simply one, as Lidless stated, of proceeding with insufficient data--but at what point is the data sufficient to call the result knowledge? Which is all a way to me of begging the question of what knowledge is. Empircally, what was knowledge in 1870 in many fields is no longer knowledge, because we have more data now. But that doesn't falsify the state of the knowledge _then_.

I think it's always a case of best-effort with the given resources. And being willing to admit that sometimes one cannot "know" for sure yet.

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Guruthostirn
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 7:07 pm
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Ok, well, I came up with an interesting assault on the Gettier problem. We're actually going away from the scope of the GP into broader epistemology...the areas of foundationalism, coherentism, and such.

The GP is very basic...knowledge about facts. Before it the accepted rule was that knowledge was justified true belief. However, Gettier pulled a trick to show that knowledge Could not be justified true belief because someone could have knowledge without being justified. The problem with it is that Gettier put in a time element which has no business being there...as I'm sure we could easily note. Gettier only disproved knowledge over time being justified true belief, and knowledge over time is VERY slippery...because things can change.

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Axordil
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 7:23 pm
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Whereas knowledge at any given time runs a much higher chance of being incomplete. An interesting problem, if not a true paradox.

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Lidless
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 8:45 pm
Als u het leven te ernstig neemt, mist u de betekenis.
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Guruthostirn wrote:
You read Kant?
'Fraid not. The deep philosophical theoretics are a turn off to me - it lacks the human element even though much of what Kant talks about is effectively the bridge between the human mind and the rest of the universe.

I used to live and breathe maths, but at university it became too dry for me (Corollary 1 to the second lemma of the third yawn). I concentrated instead on statistics and probability - closer to the real world.

For me, such philosophy is the same as religion, only less personal. Ultimately nothing can be proved and you just end up chasing your own coat tail. I'd rather spend my finite brain power elsewhere. Obviously in posting on B77, I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

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Guruthostirn
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 9:31 pm
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I was curious...since your first post in the thread is a bit like some of Kant's thoughts...

I like thinking...and philosophy seems to be one of the main places for people who can do that. I liked math...but I just couldn't seem to get anywhere with Calculus...probably because I spent more time on TORC than on homework. Never really played with statistics though...they worth looking into?

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Lidless
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 10:49 pm
Als u het leven te ernstig neemt, mist u de betekenis.
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I can only speak on a personal level, but I would suggest for you, if you hit your head on Calculus, there's still a world of maths out there that is sublime in its internal logic - how the same result can be got to by several different roads.

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Guruthostirn
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 10:53 pm
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Actually, the most disappointing thing about Calculus is that I never took it further...only about the first third or so. I can't remember all the terms...but it was the later stuff which looked like Lots of fun!

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Teremia
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 11:29 pm
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This to Lidless about the cat:

It's not just that we "don't know yet" whether the cat is dead, is it? That's how I USED to understand these things: that the universe behaved mechanistically, but our knowledge was always doomed to be imperfect. But then more recently I remember reading about experiments that showed that at some Small Level (not as big as actual cats!), in fact the situation itself is NOT DETERMINED -- not merely "determined but unknown" -- until one measures it.

Had I more time, I would Google this merrily and be able to be more specific. But pre-Googling, the facts remain, I suppose, undetermined......:D


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Guruthostirn
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Posted: Thu 17 Feb , 2005 11:34 pm
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I think the cat is a bad example...because that conclusion implies that for reality at that level to function it requires observers. You have to escape that problem.

Maybe I merely understand it in a mechanistic manner, but I always though "undetermined" pretty much equaled "it's happened, but we only have a range of probabilities of what the outcome really is".

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Fri 18 Feb , 2005 4:25 am
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Lidless: Thus any information is incomplete and all knowledge is an estimation of reality.

I have to agree. If knowledge is defined as perfect correlation between perception and reality, one must be able to stand outside both and evaluate their correspondence. We can't stand outside either of them.

Ax: ...but at what point is the data sufficient to call the result knowledge?

Lewis Thomas has a nice quote on this: A fact is simply the point at which investigation has ceased.

To answer your question in a word: Never.

Here's something else to cook your noodle. Not only is all knowledge a probability assessment but humans do not assess probabilites correctly. We have inherent 'cognitive heuristics' that guide our assessment of probabilities and many if not most of them are fallacious. Even statisticians invariably commit these fallacies if they are not alerted beforehand to the nature of the test.

The fact that these cognitive heuristics are so widespread suggests an adaptive advantage to evaluating things improperly, but no one has yet figured out exactly what 'formula' people are using when they commit these fallacies.

For example: the fallacy of Representativeness. This causes people to give a plausible narrative a higher probability of being true than the individual events contained in the narrative. According to the laws of probability, an individual event must have a higher probility of occuring than the joint probability of that event occuring together with another. The cold war conviction that the Soviet Union would attack us has been attributed to this cognitive fallacy on the part of strategists, who routinely drew up 'scenarios' of diplomatic deterioration and assigned war a much higher likelihood than it every really had.

Take a poll among your friends and tell them you've just flipped a penny six times and it came up heads every time. Ask them how likely they think it is that the next flip will be heads as well. :scratch

I played that game with five PhD engineers and every one of them gave the wrong answer. :damnfunny

Jn

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Impenitent
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Posted: Fri 18 Feb , 2005 5:41 am
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We seek patterns; it's a survival mechanism, the seeking of some predictable outcome. The brain has evolved in that way so even when attempting empirical observation or analysis that tendency will interfere.

(specifically addressing Jn's last example; not Guru's discussion as a whole)

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Axordil
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Posted: Fri 18 Feb , 2005 3:19 pm
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Guruthostirn wrote:
I think the cat is a bad example...because that conclusion implies that for reality at that level to function it requires observers. You have to escape that problem.
Actually, reality no doubt functions quite well without observers, as it is not contingent on avoiding indeterminate states. We're the ones poking our noses around and getting weirded out by it.

jny--
Never is what I would say too. It's a matter of deciding "that's enough for my purposes" and going from there. The history of physics is quite instructive in this regard, as it is a clear record of people deciding they need a bit more information to clear up something at the edge of theory, and discovering more than they bargained for.

Impy--

Yes, precisely. There's a good book out on string theory right now that basically says the reason we don't perceive the other dimensions in which strings vibrate--the ones that evidently determine the physical constants of the univers--is because we just don't need to. If it were necessary for survival, we would.

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