Abstract
We argue that there is a large class of questions—specifically questions about how to epistemically evaluate environments—that currently available epistemic theories are not well-suited for answering, precisely because these questions are not about the epistemic state of particular agents or groups. For example, if we critique Facebook for being conducive to the spread of misinformation, then we are not thereby critiquing Facebook for being irrational, or lacking knowledge, or failing to testify truthfully. Instead, we are saying something about the social media environment. In this paper, we first propose that a new branch of epistemology–Environmental Epistemology–is needed to address these questions. We argue that environments can be proper objects of epistemic evaluation, and that there are genuine epistemic norms that govern environments. We then provide a positive account of these norms and conclude by considering how recognition of these norms may require us to rethink longstanding epistemic debates.
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Notes
We note an interesting parallel with information theory, where people often focus on the signal, but it is also critical to ensure that we have a channel that is appropriately structured to carry the type of intended signals. Information theorists have developed notions such as channel capacity to describe and evaluate the quality of this type of “environment.” Our proposal here calls for an analogous effort for epistemic environments more generally.
We will soon say more about what environments are, but for now we rely on an intuitive sense of the term.
Assuming, of course, that all appropriate safety standards were met.
In the remainder of this section, we will paint with very broad brushstrokes. There are many details we will omit, and subtleties will go unremarked. Nonetheless, we hope to convey the lack of resources in most epistemological work to account for epistemic evaluation of environments in themselves. We also, for reasons of space, omit discussion of work in some other areas of philosophy that mention environments (e.g., on measurement and instrumentation in philosophy of science), as those similarly focus on the agent (and so parallel our proposed branch (A)).
See, for example, Protagoras (313d-314a; 320a) and Meno (89e, 91d).
We take no stand on whether social media platforms can have beliefs or credences.
Following Nguyen (2018), a filter bubble is a social epistemic structure in which a person primarily sees and interacts with perspectives similar to their own. So, for example, if one is in a filter bubble of Taylor Swift fans, one may only read or hear perspectives of people who think her music is excellent. See also Sunstein (2017).
We are agnostic about whether social media platforms might play the role of testifier (e.g., when a new policy is announced). Even if so, evaluating Facebook in that capacity is not the same as evaluating Facebook’s environment epistemically.
Importantly, this does not mean that norms of inquiry have no bearing on questions related to the spread of misinformation on social media platforms. For example, when considering what individuals ought to do when trying to learn using social media, norms of inquiry will be relevant. Further, we may be concerned with organizational norms of inquiry, such as how Facebook ought to conduct research or organize their research teams.
Again, we note that many epistemologists have done excellent and important work on the social epistemology within the internet, but they have not typically focused on how to epistemically evaluate online and other environments themselves. For example, Frost-Arnold (2014) has provided compelling analyses of anonymity and deception online, but she also claims that “any problem of deception can be approached in two ways: (i) by focusing on the speaker and attempting to make her more honest, or (ii) by focusing on the hearer and attempting to shield her from dishonesty […] or increase her abilities to detect and reject falsehoods” (p. 65). We are arguing here that one can also evaluate and intervene on the environment. Similarly, Miller and Record (2013) point out that agents often form beliefs on the basis of internet technologies that they do not understand, and they consider the implications of this for the justificatory status of those beliefs. These are valuable contributions, but do not answer the questions we pose. Miller and Record (2017) consider what search engines (construed as subjects) must do to count as epistemically responsible subjects, rather than treating them as environments that contain subjects or agents.
To emphasize how cursory our discussion has been, there are also important traditions that have focused on evaluating agents (see, for example, Zagzebski, 1996; Sosa, 2007) and methods which we have not discussed here (see, for example, Popper, 2002). We believe similar arguments as those considered above apply to these traditions as well.
This is closely related to what Nguyen (2021) calls “hostile epistemology,” but his focus is on the ways that environments can be hostile to epistemic agents like us, and not on ways that environments may have positive effects or be conducive to good epistemic phenomena. We wish to expand the scope of this exciting project. See footnote 39 for further discussion of his view.
While it ultimately will be important to have a more fully worked out account of what an environment is, answering these difficult metaphysical questions is not our purpose here.
We intend agent in a minimal sense that will include many non-human animals. While our focus here will primarily be on the health of epistemic environments for people, we take it that non-human animals also engage in some kinds of epistemic activities in environments (for example, a fox may investigate whether a cave is suitable for a den), and so we could identify a notion of epistemic environmental health for them as well. We’re grateful to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this point.
We do not wish to put our hat in for the substantivalist by referring to regions of space, and readers should feel free to replace this with their preferred nomenclature (see Dasgupta, 2015 for discussion of this view and a competitor). We do wish to rely on an intuitive and flexible understanding of regions of space. For example, we wish to be able to say things like: a redwood forest is a region of space made up of redwoods, a skate park is a region of space designated by the city for skating, and Twitter is a region of cyberspace made up of (at least) Tweets. What sets the boundaries for such regions depends on the environment in question; in some cases it is social decision or convention (the city decides where the skatepark ends), in other cases not (the redwood forest ends where there are no more redwoods). We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging us to think about this issue, and to Tim Juvshik for immensely helpful discussion.
A more complete definition would also address the persistence conditions of environments. While we don’t take on this task here, it is worth noting that the duration of an environment will sometimes have epistemic effects. For example, prolonged oppressive environments are likely to have more significant epistemic effects on agents than oppressive environments that are quickly corrected or dissolved.
While our examples have mostly been about created environments, found or natural environments (and hybrid environments) can also affect epistemic phenomena. For example, it is easier to share information verbally next to a peaceful lake than in the midst of a hurricane, and a forest at dusk is less conducive to the formation of correct visual beliefs than the same forest at noon (at least for epistemic agents with stereotypically human perceptual capabilities).
While their primary interest is moral responsibility, Doris and Murphy (2007) offer the potential example that individuals in combat environments are typically cognitively degraded, and that cognitive degradation can involve a person’s powers of rationality being disrupted.
And of course, there are many other examples, such as: (1) Descartes seems to rely on the environmental facts that god exists and is not a deceiver to argue that the world must be understandable for beings like us (Descartes, 1984). (2) Spinoza claims that environmental conditions that the Israelites experienced in Egypt prevented them from being able to understand god’s decrees (Spinoza, 2007, TTP ii.46). (3) Harding (1978 p. 205–206) discusses ways that the communities we occupy can shape our values and influence our inquiries. (4) The literature on higher order evidence and irrelevant influences is often concerned with the effects of environments on beliefs (see Street, 2006 and Schoenfield, 2014, respectively; thanks to an anonymous reviewer). (5) Goldman (1999) likens online environments to fake barn country that have features that impact epistemic goods for individuals. (6) Nguyen (2018) analyzes the sources of epistemic bubbles—social epistemic structures in which other relevant voices have been left out—and echo chambers—social epistemic structures from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited.
Of course, evidence about the effects of environments on epistemic phenomena will be essential for philosophers to consider when identifying these norms.
Other examples of work that begins to bridge this gap can be found in Rini (2017) and Record and Miller (2022)’s discussion of norms of communication on platforms. Both suggest platform level changes (environmental changes) will help cultivate appropriate norms in users. One further example is Simon’s (2010) work which is concerned with the ways that web environments effect epistemic phenomena and suggests that platform designers have obligations to increase transparency of how the environments work in certain cases.
The metaphor of health has often been used for evaluating natural environments (cf. UN environment program, 2021) and living environments (Berg, 2022). We acknowledge that other language could be used instead. For example, some working on social media have relied on metaphors of pollution (Phillips & Milner, 2021) and trash (Frost-Arnold, 2023), though we note the connections between health and pollution in non-epistemic environments.
At the end of this section, we discuss the interesting issue of what it means for natural environments to have epistemic functions.
Of course, the skeptic disagrees. But we here ignore skeptical hypotheses.
Certain externalists will disagree (see, Lyons, 2013 e.g.). In a BiV scenario, forming beliefs in response to the evidence from one’s senses is not to form beliefs on the basis of a reliable process. For that ordinarily reliable process is not reliable in that scenario. For the moment, we will set this concern aside. But in Sect. 7 we will address it and argue that Environmental Epistemology sheds new light on the internalist/externalist debate over such cases.
Plausibly much more stringent norms can be defended. For example, one might think that a sufficiently lower threshold of deception would count as sufficient for violating a general EEN. It is worth noting that more stringent norms along these lines will plausibly have implications for the permissibility of building many novel technologies including Deepfake technologies and Large Language Models.
To reiterate a point made previously, this does not mean that we couldn’t develop such an account of what makes environments epistemically healthy for different types of agents (e.g. non-human animals).
To the extent that found and natural environments can have epistemic functions, then these norms will apply to them as well. If they have functions, general EENs will apply to them and determine whether the fulfilling those functions well would make the environment epistemically healthy.
One could build out this response in more detail by appealing to Cummins’s (1975) analysis of functions in which ascription of a function to something is to ascribe it a set of corresponding dispositions (p. 758). In our analysis, this would require that environments regularly have dispositions to bring about various epistemic phenomena, which often seems correct. Thus, natural environments would have epistemic functions. Of course, one might object to Cummings’s analysis, and so we include these details only in a footnote. More generally, if one rejects the claim that natural environments have epistemic functions, then one may still accept our view as applying to a more restricted set of environments.
Ideal epistemologists should arguably also take this into consideration. It may be that in the same way that we usefully idealize individual epistemic agents in order to answer various questions, we may find it fruitful to idealize the environments they’re in. Given our view that norms of cognitive success should be sensitive to facts about the environment, it may be interesting to determine (a) what an ideal epistemic environment is like, and (b) what the correct norms for cognitive success are. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging us to consider this.
There is, of course, the further question about whether those in charge of the platform will find this convincing. While we’d like to think the answer is yes, it’s far from clear. One thing we will say, however, is that even if a platform company were to reject the deeper normative implications of our view, it is hard to deny the pull of specific EENs. After all, these arise as a result of the aims of the platform. So, for example, if someone decided to create an online school, there are clearly better and worse ways of satisfying their aims. Thus, even if they reject the more fundamental picture, we hope they would recognize that they have instrumental reason to do what they’ve set out to do well.
We close with some additional observations about the relationship between our view and Nguyen (2021). Nguyen provides an account of one way that environments might be hostile to epistemic agents like us. Interpreted through the lens of our view, we would say he identified an important way that some environments are in violation of the epistemic norms that govern them—i.e. epistemically unhealthy. What we have done, is provide a more general normative framework for epistemically evaluating all environments. We, thus, think of our projects as friendly companions exploring similar terrain. We suggest that similar things can be said about Mills (1997) and Fricker (2007).
By “cognitive success” we mean epistemic success states like the state of being justified, the state of knowing, the state of understanding, etc.
Another way of putting this: there must be a connection between justification and truth in the relevant environment.
We take Lyons (2013) to be giving voice to an objection like this.
While some individual-level solutions show promise (see, e.g., McGrew & Wineburg 2019; Pavlounis et al.,2021), even these solutions require very specific facts about the environment to hold.
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Acknowledgements
This research was partially supported by a grant from the Office of Naval Research to MH and DD. We are also grateful to Jennifer Rose Carr, Craig Callender, David Brink, and two anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper. Many thanks also to the audiences at the 2022 International Association for Computing and Philosophy and UC San Diego’s Spring 2022 Reasons and Rationality Reading group.
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Amico-Korby, D., Harrell, M. & Danks, D. Environmental epistemology. Synthese 203, 81 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04504-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04504-3