Abstract
Philosophers of information, according to Luciano Floridi (The philosophy of information. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, p 32), study how information should be “adequately created, processed, managed, and used.” A small number of epistemologists have employed the concept of information as a cornerstone of their theoretical framework. How this concept can be used to make sense of seemingly intractable epistemological problems, however, has not been widely explored. This paper examines Fred Dretske’s information-based epistemology, in particular his response to radical epistemological skepticism. We discuss the relationship between information, evidence and knowledge in relation to the problem of skepticism and the options available to an information-based epistemology for dealing with it.
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Notes
- 1.
Notes:
It should be noted that gathering, creating, processing, managing and using information is not always done for the acquisition of knowledge or other epistemic standings. Sometimes, for example, information is collected for the sake of collecting more information or for justifying policy decisions. Nevertheless, the kind of information-based inquiry we explore here is that which is pursued with the final purpose of gaining knowledge about the matter at hand. This is the kind of inquiry pursued in Dretske (1981) and Floridi (2010), among others. These scholars accordingly view information as, in their own distinctive ways, an important component of epistemology.
- 2.
- 3.
The barn-façade case was first put forward in print by Goldman (1976), who credits the example to Carl Ginet.
- 4.
For Dretske’s initial rejection of epistemic closure, see Dretske (1970, 1971). See also his recent exchange with Hawthorne (Dretske 2005a, c; Hawthorne 2005). For a critical discussion of the implications of Dretske’s informational epistemology on epistemic closure see Jäger (2004) and Shackel (2006).
- 5.
Although there are few philosophers these days who deny this principle, it was also famously denied by Nozick (1981), for reasons very similar to the reasons offered by Dretske.
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- 7.
For an extended discussion of the goal of information collection and dissemination see Fallis (2002). Note that even those who deny that the goal of information services is for users to acquire knowledge grant that in a large range of contexts our goal in collection and disseminating information is to acquire knowledge. For example, the information management scholar Chun Wei Choo expresses, albeit in different terms, a widely held view when he states that the primary goal of information management is to ‘harness the information resources and information capabilities of the organization in order to enable the organization to learn and adapt to its changing environment’ (Choo 2002, xv). Later, Choo writes that the ‘transfiguration of information into knowledge is the goal of information management’ (Choo 2002, xiv).
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Kerr, E.T., Pritchard, D. (2012). Skepticism and Information. In: Demir, H. (eds) Luciano Floridi’s Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4292-5_10
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