La disseminazione della conoscenza nell'era digitale

The advent of the digital age has profoundly transformed how knowledge is produced, filtered, and disseminated. This collection of essays examines the epistemic implications of our increasingly networked existence, focusing on the conditions under which online information can qualify as genuine knowledge. Drawing on epistemological theories of testimony, trust, and epistemic authority, the contributors explore how web-based information systems — from Wikipedia to Google's PageRank — create new reputational hierarchies that substitute for traditional verification methods. Analyses of social media discussions reveal that online communication fosters uncritical belief formation, appeal to unwarranted authority, and affiliation-driven reasoning, undermining robust knowledge dissemination. The essays further interrogate whether online trust differs fundamentally from offline trust, and whether cognitive outsourcing — delegating information gathering to external tools and agents — genuinely threatens epistemic autonomy. Together, these contributions demonstrate that digital epistemology poses vital new challenges for contemporary philosophy of knowledge.