> His real belief was not exactly that the PR broke it, it's that the root cause of the break was isolated to his code changes. This is evident from the debugging procedure he described. And that distinction is very important, because that detail, and not some abstract piece of philosophy, is also the real source of the challenges that motivated describing the situation in a blog post in the first place.
Yes, but the exact same point can be made about the Gettier case. The problem is inappropriately specified beliefs. The problem with that is that it's impossible ex-ante to know how to correctly specify your beliefs.
For instance, you could just say that the problem with the Gettier case is that the person really just believed there was a "cow-like object" out there. Voila, problem solved! But the fact of the matter is that the person believes there is a cow - just like this person believes that their PR broke the app.
I think I agree with the parent. While this can be made into a Gettier case by messing with the scope of the JTB (pull request broke it vs change broke it) I don't think it really works as intended by the author, and it feels like a poor example in a field teeming with much more straight forwards instances.
I can't simplify the explicit examples I have in my head enough to be worth typing up, but the gist is that I can be correct about the end behavior of a of a piece of code, but can be completely wrong about the code path that it takes to get there. I have good reasons to believe it takes that code path. But I don't know about signal handler or interrupt perhaps, that leads to the same behavior, but does not actually use the code path I traced out.
This happens to me reasonably often while debugging.
Yes, but the exact same point can be made about the Gettier case. The problem is inappropriately specified beliefs. The problem with that is that it's impossible ex-ante to know how to correctly specify your beliefs.
For instance, you could just say that the problem with the Gettier case is that the person really just believed there was a "cow-like object" out there. Voila, problem solved! But the fact of the matter is that the person believes there is a cow - just like this person believes that their PR broke the app.