Privacy and Knowing Who
Description
Due to illness of the speaker, this meeting has been cancelled!
Privacy and Knowing Who: A Contextual Approach
Protecting your privacy means protecting what other people can come to know of you. Put differently, it means ensuring that other people cannot come to know who you are. But the concept of 'knowing who' is context-relative in at least two dimensions. In the first place, 'knowing who' allows of degrees: I can know who Obama is better than you. (In this respect, 'knowing who' differs from 'knowing that' which does not allow of degree modification.) In the second place, one utterance of the form 's knows who' can be true whilst another utterance of the form 's knows who' can be false, depending on the question at issue. For instance, "John knows who Obama is" can be true if the question is whether Obama is President or Vice-President of the USA. But "John knows who Obama is" can be false if the question is whether Obama has two or three daughters. (In this respect, 'knowing who' might be similar to 'knowing that' which has recently been argued to be sensitive in a similar way) In this paper we will (i) argue for the contextuality of 'knowing who', and (ii) limn the ramifications this contextual approach of 'knowing who' has for the discussion around privacy and privacy protection.
Speaker(s)
Dr Martijn Blaauw (*1977) is Coordinator of the 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology. He received his PhD in Philosophy (cum laude) from VU University Amsterdam in 2004 for a thesis defending a contrastivist solution to the problem of radical scepticism. Since his PhD, he has held positions at the University of Aarhus (Denmark, postdoctoral researcher, 2004-2005), the University of Aberdeen (United Kingdom, Lecturer in Philosophy, 2005-2007), the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VENI laureate 2007-2011), and, since 2011, at the 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology. He has published in several leading international journals on knowledge theory topics, and is currently writing a monograph entitled 'Knowledge in Contrast'. Later this year, his book 'Contrastivism in Philosophy' will be released by Routledge Publishers: a collection of articles on the role of contrast classes in philosophy. In his current research, he focuses on the privacy debate, and in particular on the knowledge-theoretical aspects of that debate
Location
Utrecht
Organiser
Philosophy & Technology
Name and contact details for information
Further information from drs.ing. Henk Uijttenhout (vz), tel: 070 - 3875293 / 06 - 26715554 or via the e-mail address below