Comment by dapperdrake
20 days ago
Everywhere.
Computing and formal mathematics rely on exhaustive case analysis and binary logic. And even with The Excluded Middle, there are unprovable statements.
There are at least two incompatible ternary truth tables (hello there SQL NULL) in formal logic. Then there is fuzzy logic, but that is also a formalization.
(NP-complete problems and uncomputable problems in binary logic are another sore point.)
And for informal systems the best people have found so far is hypothesis testing, which is to say that only the rejection of hypothesis based on measurements works, but not confirming a hypothesis.
Turtles and blech all the way down.
Agree with your pov, especially the idea that you can only reject hypotheses, not confirm them.
What I keep seeing operationally is that teams are forced to act before hypotheses can be tested or falsified. For example, inspections completed, assets redeployed, and customers responded to. Only later are they asked to prove correctness.
When that gap shows up for you, what was the concrete trigger? An audit, a customer dispute, a safety review, or something else?