Objectives: To identify indicators of accuracy for consumer health information on the Internet. The results will help lay people distinguish accurate from inaccurate health information on the Internet. Design: Several popular search engines (Yahoo, AltaVista, and Google) were used to find Web pages on the treatment of fever in children. The accuracy and completeness of these Web pages was determined by comparing their content with that of an instrument developed from authoritative sources on treating fever in children. The presence on these Web pages of a number of proposed indicators of accuracy, taken from published guidelines for evaluating the quality of health information on the Internet, was noted. Main Outcome Measures: Correlation between the accuracy of Web pages on treating fever in children and the presence of proposed indicators of accuracy on these pages. Likelihood ratios for the presence (and absence) of these proposed indicators. Results: One hundred Web pages were identified and characterized as "more accurate" or "less accurate." Three indicators correlated with accuracy: displaying the HONcode logo, having an organization domain, and displaying a copyright. Many proposed indicators taken from published guidelines did not correlate with accuracy (e.g., the author being identified and the author having medical credentials) or inaccuracy (e.g., lack of currency and advertising). Conclusions: This method provides a systematic way of identifying indicators that are correlated with the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of health information on the Internet. Three such indicators have been identified in this study. Identifying such indicators and informing the providers and consumers of health information about them would be valuable for public health care.

The digital divide refers to inequalities in access to information technology. Those people who do not have access to information technology are at a significant economic and social disadvantage. As with any other policy decision, in order to evaluate policies for dealing with the digital divide, we need to know exactly what our goal should be. Since the principal value of access to information technology is that it leads to knowledge, work in epistemology can help us to clarify our goal in the context of the digital divide. In this paper, I argue that epistemic value theory can help us to determine which distribution of knowledge to aim for. Epistemic value theory cannot specify a particular distribution to aim for, but it can significantly narrow down the range of possibilities. Additionally, I indicate how the exercise of applying epistemic value theory to the case of the digital divide furthers work in epistemology.

How can one verify the accuracy of recorded information (e.g., information found in books, newspapers, and on Web sites)? In this paper, I argue that work in the epistemology of testimony (especially that of philosophers David Hume and Alvin Goldman) can help with this important practical problem in library and information science. This work suggests that there are four important areas to consider when verifying the accuracy of information: (i) authority, (ii) independent corroboration, (iii) plausibility and support, and (iv) presentation. I show how philosophical research in these areas can improve how information professionals go about teaching people how to evaluate information. Finally, I discuss several further techniques that information professionals can and should use to make it easier for people to verify the accuracy of information.

An important issue for information ethics is how much control people should have over the dissemination of information that they have created. Since intellectual property policies have an impact on our welfare primarily because they have a huge impact on our ability to acquire knowledge, there is an important role for epistemology in resolving this issue. This paper discusses the various ways in which intellectual property policies can impact knowledge acquisition both positively and negatively. In particular, it looks at how intellectual property policies can affect the amount of information that people create, the quality of that information, the accessibility of that information, the diversity of that information, and the locatability of that information.

The doctrinal paradox shows that aggregating individual judgments by taking a majority vote does not always yield a consistent set of collective judgments. Philip Pettit, Luc Bovens, and Wlodek Rabinowicz have recently argued for the epistemic superiority of an aggregation procedure that always yields a consistent set of judgments. This paper identifies several additional epistemic advantages of their consistency maintaining procedure. However, this paper also shows that there are some circumstances where the majority vote procedure is epistemically superior. The epistemic value of maintaining consistency does not always outweigh the epistemic value of making true judgments.

Miranda Fricker argues that powerless social groups may be subject to a unique form of injustice: hermeneutical injustice. On her account, deficiencies in the shared tools of interpretation may render the experiences of powerless social groups (for instance, women prior to the era of second wave feminism) both incomprehensible and incommunicable. In this thesis, I argue that Fricker has mischaracterized hermeneutical injustice and the silence of marginalized social groups: rather than lacking understanding, powerless groups are often denied rational authority with respect to their own social experiences or choose to self-silence. For this reason, I argue that many of the cases of hermeneutical injustice offered by Fricker collapse into cases of testimonial injustice. This mischaracterization has led Fricker to propose solutions to hermeneutical injustice that are inadequate; in response, I offer a solution that prescribes self-reflexive awareness of the ways that power and privilege shape our interpretive frameworks.

No description available.

<p> My dissertation lies at the philosophical intersection of the American pragmatist tradition and contemporary epistemology. By treating truth, justification, and belief as matters of degree, I develop a measure of knowledge that captures all of our fundamental intuitions while providing answers to the problems of epistemic luck, skepticism, and scientific pessimism. </p><p> Traditionally, knowledge is understood as justified true belief that is not due to luck. My project follows this general outline. First, I describe the pragmatist understanding of truth first articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce in the late nineteenth century. My first chapter offers Peirce's understanding of truth as the best explanation of our intuitive understanding of what it is for a proposition to be the case and shows how we can understand Peirce's theory as compatible with contemporary theories of truth. </p><p> In my second chapter, I develop a theory of belief such that an agent believes a proposition when she acts as if that proposition were a rule governing her behavior. On this view, beliefs are theoretical entities posited to make sense of other agents' actions. Following this account of belief, I describe what it is for a belief to be true and argue that sense of truth in which beliefs are true is best understood as an approximation of the full descriptive truth. </p><p> My third, fourth, and fifth chapters are an account of justification. Chapter 3 is a descriptive account of synchronic justification: we all reject or accept propositions in accordance with maximizing the coherence of our belief-networks. Chapters 4 and 5 articulate and then defend a new measure of diachronic justification, which is a measure of the degree to which a belief is appropriately revisable and therefore embeddable in an ongoing process of fallibilist inquiry. I develop a novel formal quantification of methodological justification and show that it gives plausible results when applied to popular cases. </p><p> My final chapter brings justification, truth, and belief together into a scalar knowledge measure. I locate my theory in ongoing epistemic inquiry, describing its conceptual advantages over rival theories as well as its ability to replicate their successes.</p>

<p> In deliberative argument, in political discourse, in teaching, and in casual conversation, as rhetors we often hope that our attempts at interaction will have some effect on the participants in these discursive environments. The phenomena of stubbornness, however, would seem to suggest that, despite our efforts, there are times when rhetoric just doesn't work. This dissertation complicates this premise, and in so doing complicates common understandings of both stubbornness and rhetorical effect. As I argue, rhetorical effects exist within a complex rhetoric <i>system</i>, within which they circulate and are interconnected with a diversity of other rhetorical and non-rhetorical elements. Using N. Katherine Hayles's concept of "making the cut," I argue that within such complex systems, stability and change are tangled up in an interdependent relationship; in short, in order for complexity to exist it must be constrained by contingent stabilities. These necessary stabilities mask the way that systems are always moving, and so we often do not see changes in the rhetoric systems we inhabit. In this sense, these changes are <i> compensatory</i>, and they work to maintain a stability that can manifest precisely as stubbornness. In delineating what I call a "rhetoric-systems" approach, this dissertation maps the stabilities and movements of several different rhetoric systems, and provides new insight into the complex and relational movement of rhetorical effect. Our use of this approach asks us to recognize the existence and value of certainty and stability, and <i> then</i> to pull back and recognize the existence of complexity and change. The approach integrates insights from systems theory (and so from the sciences) into existing rhetorical theory, and in so doing models an interdisciplinary approach to public rhetorics and writing studies that is firmly grounded in rhetorical theory.</p>

<p> The complexity, subtlety, interlinking, and scale of many problems faced individually and collectively in today's rapidly changing world requires an epistemology--a way of thinking about our knowing--capable of facilitating new kinds of responses that avoid recapitulation of old ways of thinking and living. Epistemology, which implicitly provides the basis for engagement with the world via the fundamental act of distinction, must therefore be included as a central facet of any practical attempts at self/world transformation. We need to change <i>how</i> we think, not just <i> what</i> we think. The new epistemology needs to be of a higher order than the source of the problems we face. </p><p> This theoretical, transdisciplinary dissertation argues that such a new epistemology needs to be recursive and process-oriented. This means that the thoughts about thinking that it produces must explicitly follow the patterns of thinking by which those thoughts are generated. The new epistemology is therefore also phenomenological, requiring the development of a reflexivity in thinking that recursively links across two levels of order--between content and process. The result is an epistemology that is of (and for) the <i> whole</i> human being. It is an enacted (will-imbued) and aesthetic (feeling-permeated) epistemology (thinking-penetrated) that is sensitive to and integrative of material, soul, and spiritual aspects of ourselves and our world. I call this kind of epistemology <i>aesthetic</i>, because its primary characteristic is found in the phenomenological, mutually fructifying and transformative marriage between the capacity for thinking and the capacity for feeling. </p><p> Its foundations are brought forward through the confluence of multiple domains: cybernetic epistemology, the esoteric epistemology of anthroposophy (the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner), and the philosophy of the implicit as developed by Eugene Gendlin. </p><p> The practice of aesthetic epistemology opens new phenomenal domains of experience, shedding light on relations between ontology and epistemology, mind and body, logic and thinking, as well as on the formation (and transformation) of identity, the immanence of thinking in world-processes, the existence of different types of logic, and the nature of beings, of objects, and most importantly of thinking itself and its relationship to spirit.</p>