Digital Knowledge by J. Adam Carter;

Author:J. Adam Carter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2024-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Steup’s point – to be clear, is not that no form of epistemic circularity is problematic (on the contrary, he concedes there are several forms that are egregiously so). Rather, his point is that if we include – within the scope of the kinds of circularity that is vicious – circularity that arises simply in virtue of (put generally) one’s relying on something to argue that that very thing is reliable, we have set ourselves up to fail. As he puts it, if that sort of ‘epistemic circularity were vicious, a cogent argument for the reliability of one’s car would not be possible’.19

Regardless of whether one accepts this kind of impossibility argument, it’s worth noting that the digital knower (who aspires to transition from mere to reflective digital knowledge) needn’t be lumped together in epistemic bad company with Stroud’s crystal-ball gazers who appeal to the crystal ball to come to view it as reliable. After all – and this is a point Sosa (2009) emphasises in response to Stroud – at least on an externalist epistemology, we are going to be within our rights to simply register that ordinary perceiving, memory, etc., really is reliable, and crystal ball gazing is not; thus, appealing to a given epistemic source in support of its reliability needn’t put one on the same footing epistemically as, for example, one who appeals to crystal ball gazing to support, unreliably and mistakenly so, its reliability.20

The above kind of thinking offers us a fresh perspective from which to revisit the alleged vicious circularity that would crop up for Otto were he to rely on digital memory in some way or another in the course of judging that the process of using that memory would (in a particular case) likely enough issue in an apt belief. Bearing in mind Sosa’s response to Stroud (as well as both Sosa’s and Steup’s observations about what is even possible to expect of us), we should think that the kind of epistemic circularity Otto deserves to be charged with is not (nearly) as vicious as initially alleged. It is, at any rate, no more vicious than the kind of circularity that we are damned into, whenever we would attempt to justify even our most reliable brain-based faculties, such as perception, biomemory, or inference. In short: rather than to lump Otto with the crystal ball gazers, we should more rightly lump him in with ordinary perceivers who view perception as reliable, or ordinary (brain-bound) reasoners who rely in some way on basic inference rules to argue that they are reliable.

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