Abstract
My aim in this paper is to give a philosophical analysis of the relationship between contingently available technology and the knowledge that it makes possible. My concern is with what specific subjects can know in practice, given their particular conditions, especially available technology, rather than what can be known “in principle” by a hypothetical entity like Laplace’s Demon. The argument has two parts. In the first, I’ll construct a novel account of epistemic possibility that incorporates two pragmatic conditions: responsibility and practicability. For example, whether subjects can gain knowledge depends in some circumstances on whether they have the capability of gathering relevant evidence. In turn, the possibility of undertaking such investigative activities depends in part on factors like ethical constraints, economical realities, and available technology. In the second part of the paper, I’ll introduce “technological possibility” to analyze the set of actions made possible by available technology. To help motivate the problem and later test my proposal, I’ll focus on a specific historical case, one of the earliest uses of digital electronic computers in a scientific investigation. I conclude that the epistemic possibility of gaining access to scientific knowledge about certain subjects depends (in some cases) on the technological possibility for making responsible investigations.
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Notes
The main thread of philosophical accounts of epistemic possibility traces at least to Moore (1962), and the topic has enjoyed a recent flourishing (see, e.g., the collected volume by Egan and Weatherson 2011). According to the canonical account, when a subject says that something is possible, we should understand this claim as being made relative to a person, a group, or a set of information. But precisely which person, group, or set of information? Egan and Weatherson (2011) identify three clusters of answers: contextualists think the context of utterance somehow specifies an answer (see DeRose 1991; von Fintel and Gillies 2011), relativists look to the context of assessment (see Egan et al. 2005; MacFarlane 2011), and expressivists think modal statements express the speaker’s mental state of uncertainty (see Yalcin 2011). The discussion in this paper centers on the canonical contextualist accounts, though I will make note of some divergent views.
Expressivists would presumably disagree. For expressivists, epistemic possibilities express a subject’s uncertainty rather than describing a relationship between the subject’s knowledge (or information) and the state of the world (see, e.g. Yalcin 2011). I must set this view aside in this paper.
Exactly how to define the relevant community is a matter of earnest debate. The basic premise of relativist accounts of epistemic possibility is that contextualist accounts cannot readily handle cases of agreement, disagreement, eavesdropping, or temporally dislocated responses to purported possibility claims. See Egan (2007) and MacFarlane (2011). See also von Fintel and Gillies (2011) for a review of some responses.
The phrase “possible for” makes my notion of technological possibility subject-relative (see Gibbs 1970 for an analysis of “possible for”). We sometimes speak of technological possibilities in a more abstract sense. For example, there is a sense in which it is technologically possible (for some unspecified someone) to travel to the moon. I have no principled objection to this usage, but in the present paper I am concerned with cases in which S is specified—and locked to a particular time, space, and circumstance.
I owe a considerable debt to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to reconsider an earlier, wrongheaded approach to analyzing conceptual means.
My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this concern to my attention.
Seddon actually discusses logical possibility, so I have made some minor adjustments.
It might be objected that what makes a conceptual means “too complex” to be conceivable necessarily has to do with brain structures, and therefore could be ruled out on grounds of physical impossibility. But this is merely a plausible retort, not a definitive one.
The third approach, numerical attack, particularly when it took the form of Monte Carlo calculation, required some advocacy before it was considered acceptable throughout the scientific community, but it was almost immediately accepted within the Manhattan Project itself, perhaps in part because of enduring frustrations with the other two approaches—an interesting story in its own right, but beyond the scope of the present paper. Galison (1996) is a good starting point for that story.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the audience at the 2011 meeting of the Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice for comments on portions of this paper. I also owe debts to Anjan Chakravartty, Boaz Miller, Eleanor Louson, an anonymous reviewer, and especially Greg Lusk for their comments and suggestions that have substantially improved the paper. This paper was completed while I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto.
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Record, I. Technology and Epistemic Possibility. J Gen Philos Sci 44, 319–336 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-013-9230-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-013-9230-8