The following is a web adaptation of a paper I wrote for a seminar on epistemology. I think this idea has the potential to revolutionize epistemology in the 21st century - maybe I’ll write a better paper about it later.

The discipline of cybernetics, created in the 1940’s by Norbert Wiener, is the science of information processing systems. Recent developments in cybernetic technology have given us reason to re-evaluate the way we think about knowledge. This is because knowledge is certainly related in some way to information. However, I do not think it has been made clear in exactly what way they are related. When I sit down at a computer with access to the internet, I feel smarter; I am able to answer questions that I would never be able to otherwise, with very little effort on my part. One likely explanation of this phenomenon is that I am somehow more knowledgeable when I am sitting at a computer. But this does not fit into the usual conception of knowledge; I doubt that sitting down at a computer automatically changes any beliefs of mine, nor does it justify them. This leads me to think that there should be a theory of knowledge that allows for this kind of thing to be called knowledge. Generally, I believe that a claim to knowledge is a claim to a certain competence; it is commonly said that knowledge is power, and “power” is often used analogously with other types of competence. I intend to show that a claim to knowledge (in the sense of knowledge about the world) is a claim to have access to information.

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