Social Epistemology and the Digital Divide

The digital divide refers to inequalities in access to information technology. One of the main reasons why the digital divide is an important issue is that access to information technology has a tremendous impact on people’s ability to acquire knowledge. According to Alvin Goldman (1999), the project of social epistemology is to identify policies and practices that have good epistemic consequences. In this paper, I argue that this sort of approach to social epistemology can help us to decide on policies for dealing with the digital divide. I argue, however, that Goldman’s specific proposals for evaluating policies are not adequate. I make an alternative proposal based on the work of John Rawls (1971) on distributive justice.