Challenges in the Epistemology of the Internet: Brief Research Review

Overview & Synopsis

The epistemology of the Internet lies at the junction of a few philosophical fields such as social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and ethics, while non-philosophical disciplines are involved as well for addressing the problems under epistemic investigation – information science, communications science, and technology science. Reviewing the research in this field, we can say that social epistemology is more than a contributing discipline, being actually the philosophical branch that the epistemology of the internet falls within, since the former provides the conceptual framework and shares the most part of its methodology with the latter. The current review outlines the key theoretical points and challenges of this research and argues that, in order to crystallize a systematic epistemology of the Web space, we should not focus exclusively on the social dimension of the epistemology of the internet and on its social practical targets, but rather to built a firm theoretical foundation of this field by investigating the nature and evolution of the main entities themselves specific to the Internet (websites, search engines, groups, forums, posts, online communications, etc.), as mere epistemic products.