Abstract
Understanding is a demanding epistemic state. It involves not just knowledge that things are thus and so, but grasping the reasons why and seeing how things hang together. Gaining understanding, then, requires some amount of inquiry. Much of our inquiries are conducted online nowadays, with the help of search engines and social media. I explore the idea that online inquiry easily leads to what I will call algorithm-based illusions of understanding. Both the structure of online information presentation (with hyperlinks, shares, retweets, likes, etc.) and the operation of recommender systems make it easy for people using them to form the impression that they are conducting inquiry responsibly, whereas they are in fact led astray by irrelevant cues, spurious links between information or, even worse, various forms of misinformation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 53-64 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| Publication status | Published - 8 Oct 2019 |