The epistemic impact of data processing

Giorgio Buccellati – January 2026

A double impact

Digital databases have had a profoundly transformative effect on our way to conceive of how knowledge is articulated and conveyed. The transformation has been so rapid that it is difficult to asses its significance. Some of the comments I made with regard the pre-digital phase of categorization, configuration and shared access help in assessing the measure of the change that has intervened. Here, I will seek to define the nature of this change, in terms of both its positive and its negative effects.

The greater control which digital databases have given us has had, however unwittingly, a profoundly negative impact on the epistemic level. I describe this as “atrophy” because it is as if the very success of the database approach had blocked our normal epistemic nourishment – i. e., our ability to project and imagine (Hoeyer & Widman 2020, Hugget 2020, Haciguzeller 2021, Kansa 2021).

We will explore this under the following headings: in each cse, we look at the positive impact first, and then and its negative counterpart.

Control

Ever since their beginnings, humans have been able to gain distance from their environment by overlaying it with their understanding of it. Even the earliest evidence of spatial competence (Wynn 1989) points to the ability to understand the properties of raw materials and to act on them. It was knowledge that made it possible to orgsnize the world and to maximize its potential.

In other words, knowledge generates control. To “de-fine” means to set boundaries, our own boundaries, on reality, and thus to enhance our ability to manage it.

Digital databases have increased to a seemengly unlimited degree this sense of control. The data are at our disposal in their totality, we can not only access them in full detail, but also

organize data as we see fit,
create clusters according to select features which some data share,
establish patterns of cooccurrence,
make statements of non-occurrence which are all the more reliable the larger the inventory is.

All of this happens at a moment’s notice, leaving no room for uncertainty or doubt. The assumption is that the results are true and exclusive, meaning that no other result is possible. We “own” the data in a way that was never even imaginable before.

Critical thought

The sense of control is so pervasive that it tends to dull the ability to engage in critical thought. Control can nurture the conviction that the result of any search is a definitive answer, with two fundamental corollaries.

One tends to accept the result of a query as true, not only because of the vastness of the inventory that is being searched, but also because of the nature of the process.
The immediacy of the process, no alternative

One is dulled inot compliancce

The whole

inferential sense of the whole through sorts

Perception

lack of perception

The fragments

Datafication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datafication)

Linking the fragments

patterns, clusters

Developing an argument

structure

The known

Accessing the already known

By definition, a database includes only known data. , so whatever we access

Intuition

experiment hypothesis