>> I have many blank pages in my
knowledge base. I always assume something is going on that I don't
know about which make any conclusions I may come to very suspect.
Nope. Wrong. You can conclude NEGATIVES from the things
you know that may make xxx assumption impossible.
This is an important point. You cannot conclude something
is possible with holes in your knowledge. Most of the time,
there are SOME holes in your knowledge.
BUT you can perfectly well conclude something is impossible
if you have imperfect knowledge and you are willing to
face the implications of your reasoning. By the last, I
mean you have understand that the conclusion of impossibility
is predicated on the actual truth of what you "know". So
you must be aware that if what you "know" is later proved
false, you have to abandon the conclusion of impossibility.
As an example, if I were to discover that the OS
ALWAYS keeps the disk contents synched up, no matter what,
then I would have to realize that my conclusion that
the hot-swapping you described was possibly safe. I
couldn't CONCLUDE it was safe, but I couldn't reject it
either. I'll let you know when I'm ready to believe
that. (BTW, there are fault-tolerant systems that
can do exactly that by implementing audits of changes
which are safe-stored to one disk before a change is
commited to the original disk. On THOSE systems, I
couldn't conclude what I said. Though I might
reinstate it if I found out the auditing process was
flawed. This goes on ...).
Within these limits, though, this is a very powerful
tool for drawing valid conclusions with imperfect knowledge.
It's all the more valuable because it fits so many real-world
situations. You're always drawing valid negative conclusions!
I've always maintained that we pessimists are the happiest
people around. We get nothing but pleasant surprises, having
always anticipated worse! Besides, we're right most of the time.
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