# The epistemology of blogging



## somnambulist (Aug 29, 2009)

Μια ενδιαφέρουσα συζήτηση για τα μπλογκ

Alan Saunders: Hi, I'm Alan Saunders, and this week on The Philosopher's Zone, we are blogging. Tash on All in the Mind which you've just heard, has a blog, a sort of regularly updated online journal of information, ideas and opinions.

Blogging has changed the way in which people acquire knowledge and justify their beliefs, but are these changes good or bad? In particular, are we, as philosophers put it, 'epistemically better off' as a result of blogging. That's to say, does blogging give us a better or more reliable knowledge? Or, as the American philosopher, Alvin Goldman has argued, is the blogosphere's emergence as an alternative to the conventional media, bad news for the epistemic prospects of the voting public?

Well shortly, we'll talk to an Australian philosopher who thinks that blogs are good news. But first, let's talk to Alvin Goldman. He's Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey and he joins us now from the U.S. Alvin Goldman, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone.

Alvin Goldman: Hello Alan, very good to talk to you.

Alan Saunders: I just said that blogging has changed the w ay in which people acquire knowledge and justify their beliefs. Do you think that is in fact true, or was that a bit of an overstatement?

Alvin Goldman: Well I don't know if I'd agree with the part about how they justify their beliefs. But undeniable that the blogosphere and many aspects of the internet unquestionably have an enormous impact on us now, and I imagine that going back even three decades, one would have a hard time imagining how much of an impact it would have.

Let me comment first on the fact that I don't write very much specifically on the blogosphere, but I do write a lot and am very interested in the project of social epistemology, so that is as you indicated in your introduction, addressed to the question of how we gain knowledge or justify belief or true belief, or not. Other times kinds of belief, false belief, misconceptions etc. as the result of our emotion in a social set of networks and social relations, so I'm very interested in that. I think I'd want to make one little correction, I'm not so much worried about there being a blogosphere or the use of blogging, but only to the extent that it might potentially replace the conventional media.

So I think that's the main worry that I would have - the impact of the internet including the blogosphere, on what is becoming or spoken of, perspectively as the demise of the conventional media, and the questions are we better off, worse off. I think the interesting question is suppose we only had the blogosphere and didn't have the conventional, how well would be of compared to an earlier era where we had the conventional media?

Alan Saunders: Well let's look t the political context of this state of affairs. You advocate what's known as an epistemic concept of democracy. What does this mean?

Alvin Goldman: OK there are various ways of trying to justify or rationalise democracy, many of them have a lot of merit but one way that has attracted a number of writers is to say that it has something to do with knowledge, something to do with the ability of a democracy to produce more accurate belief either in the body politic as a whole, or in individuals. And my own particular contribution to this is to look at the effect of having accurate or inaccurate information in the hands of the voter, and what does the voter need to know to make voting decisions and how that will impact on democracy.

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