ANON: What kind of research were you engaged in before joining the Anonymity Project?

STEVEN DAVIS: Before joining the project, my main research was in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. One of the issues I investigated was the ethics of conversation, in particular the ways in which various moral principles – like telling the truth - play in conversation. I was also interested in conversation as a way of gaining knowledge, i.e., the epistemology of conversation. For example, when we receive an anonymous message, we don’t know who the message is from, which affects the way in which we regard the reliability of the message. One of the things we want to know when we receive information is who it came from. The source of the message is one of the considerations that play a role in whether we are justified or entitled to believe the message and thus, counts towards determining whether what someone tells us is a source of knowledge.

ANON: The issue of anonymity has been with us forever, and has been dealt with by philosophers of the past. What do you think the study of philosophy can contribute to our understanding of the concept in this networked society?

STEVEN DAVIS: I don’t think that having a networked society will change the concept we have. It might make it a more important concept because it is increasingly easier to override and abrogate anonymity by various means. The hope is that a philosophical investigation will clarify the concept of anonymity and show how it relates to other concepts, privacy, for example, that are important in a networked society.

ANON: What do you mean by epistemological and normative issues of anonymity and authentication?

STEVEN DAVIS: Epistemology is the study of human knowledge. There are two fundamental questions connected to epistemology: “What do we know?“ and “How do we know it?”. The latter question is concerned with justification and entitlement, i.e. what are the justifications and entitlements for the various sorts of belief that we have? Were we neither entitled nor justified in believing a particular proposition, our belief would not amount to knowledge. When we consider conversation as a source of knowledge, what we want to look at are the kinds of justification or entitlement that play a role in conversation's being a source of knowledge. Consider the following example. Suppose we go to a lecture of a great scientist, and we know who that person is; we know that she is a great scientist.. The information that we have about who the person is serves a justificatory role for the beliefs that we garner from the lecture. If someone asks us how we know something that we came to believe because of the lecture, we might say “I heard it from a great scientist”. We justify our claim to knowledge by appealing to who that person is. When we have a claim that is sent through the internet and is delivered to our mailbox but is anonymous, we might well lack good reasons for believing the claim, everything else being equal, and thus any belief in the claim would not amount to knowledge. Information on the internet does not only come to our internet mailboxes, it appears on web pages as well. If we open a web page and do not know who constructed the web page or what institution or company with which the web page is associated, we may refrain from believing what we find on the web page, since we might not regard it as a reliable source of information. So the question is what kind of justification or entitlement, that is, what kind of authentication can we bring to bear on an anonymous source?

Contrast this with opening the Microsoft web page and reading some thing on it, but having no idea who wrote it. Is it a credible source? Is the identity of the author important or are there other means to authenticate or justify what is on Microsoft’s web page? We might know that information about viruses on the Microsoft web page is something on which we can rely, since we take it that Microsoft is reliable about viruses that effect its products. The justification we would use in this case is not that we came to believe the information because we know who the author is, but because we gleaned it from a web page that we have reason to believe is a reliable source. Here, we are relying on another means for authentication rather than the identity of a person, so the issue of anonymity drops out. The Microsoft web page information is anonymous, but because it is a reliable source we have good reasons for believing it.

The normative issues connected with anonymity have to do with questions about the value that we place on anonymity and the related notion of privacy. We have a right to express our views without revealing who we are and we have a right to have most information about ourselves shielded from public scrutiny. The question that I shall consider is what is the difference, if any, between anonymity and privacy? What is the source of these rights? What is their history? In particular, I shall look at the way that our society's becoming an internet and digital society effects the very notions of anonymity and privacy, since so much information about individuals is obtainable on the web.

ANON: How do new-media technologies affect assessments of reliability of information and justifications of knowledge?

STEVEN DAVIS: This is one of the questions that I wish to explore. The delivery of knowledge may have changed, but we have to look at whether that changes the justificatory or entitlement basis for information. Information can reach us through various sorts of chains. For example, certain kinds of chaining involve gossip or hearsay that make them less reliable than others as sources of information. Contrast this with chains within scientific communities that do not reduce the reliability of the information that we receive through such chains. Is chaining weaker in the context of the internet? The medium of a chain may affect whether we trust the information. For example, we may not want to trust a person on a talk show over our family doctor, but this can change if the individual on the talk show was the leading authority in a particular area of medicine. We live in a social world where we have to depend on others for an enormous amount of information. We have to continually assess and filter out information. As we gain information, we learn to add and adjust the filters. Over time, we become sophisticated epistemological agents constantly assessing sources of information. One of the questions then for the anonymity project is how to assess sources of information that we find on the web.