3 - The Epistemic Dimension

Summary

The epistemic human rights dimension concerns how knowledge about human rights issues is generated, articulated in discourse and normativity, and finally enforced in practice. According to the Aristotelian theory of epistemology, this represents the side of subjective thought about objective reality. Within the non-coherence approach, the fundamental question is whether the methods of knowledge creation, articulation and enforcement about human rights issues in the digital realm remain similar to the offline realm, or whether distortion exists. Two concerns emerge, which will be decisive for some conclusions about human rights knowledge creation in the digital domain through the non-coherence lens. The first is whether the digital domain has any interest in claiming normative validity of human rights rules in the first place, and second, whether the meaning of truth in the digital and non-digital domains contains similar features.