Epistemology in the Cloud
Henry Story,
University of Southampton,
Aug 26, 2018
This is quite a good paper, and to put it into perspective, when I say "fake news is a consensus problem," this is to a large degree what I mean. This paper is deep conceptually and will take some time. The first two sections take us through a tour of Lewis's and Nozick's work on counterfactuals from the 80s (I was steeped in this during my PhD work, and even had a sit-down and grilling with Lewis on his work). It then shift gears in the third section to talk about the cloud, and then wraps up with a discussion of digital sovereignity.
The answer to the question "how can we know something isn't fake news" is in this paper traced back to Nozick's dictum "Knowledge is not just in the head". The ide is that "if it were not true, I would not believe it" is more or less true depending on how easily it could be false. Henry Story runs through some nice examples to make this clear - my belief that "I have $50 in my pocket" is more likely to be true if I have no holes in my pocket, even more likely to be true if I take precautions against pickpockets. My belief in my software is more true if I have tests to ensure its reliability. My belief in a bit of cloud knowledge is more true if I have mechanisms for trust and verification. And in the cloud environment, that's currently referred to as the 'consensus problem'.
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