The question “What is knowledge?” goes back to Socrates and Plato. One of the most influential definitions that emerged later was that knowledge is justified true belief.
However, modern philosophy has shown this definition may not be sufficient. Through examples like Gettier cases, a person can hold a belief that is true and justified while still seeming to lack genuine knowledge.
What interests me is how this ancient question changes in the modern world. Today we have access to more information than any generation in history. The internet provides immediate answers to almost any question, and increasingly artificial intelligence can generate explanations on demand. Yet despite this abundance of information, certainty often seems harder to achieve. Conflicting sources, misinformation, and algorithmic content mean that people can easily encounter convincing arguments for completely opposite claims.
This raises a modern version of the Socratic problem:
If information becomes unlimited, does knowledge become easier to obtain, or paradoxically harder?
I’m curious whether others think the classical concept of knowledge still works in the information age, or whether our understanding of knowledge needs to change.
My personal take on this question -
If information becomes unlimited, it may appear that knowledge becomes easier to obtain. Yet this assumption fails under the logic developed in the preceding discussion. As systems grow in complexity, our ability to meaningfully navigate them does not scale in equal measure. The limitation shifts away from access and toward orientation.
In conditions of informational abundance, the individual is no longer constrained by scarcity, but by excess. Knowledge, often traced back to the idea of justified true belief associated with Plato, becomes destabilized when the volume of competing information exceeds our capacity to filter and priorities.
The central question is no longer what can be known, but what should be selected as knowledge.
At this point, a structural paradox emerges. Information, which conventionally functions as the foundation of knowledge, begins to undermine its own conditions of possibility. As demonstrated by Edmund Gettier, even beliefs that are both justified and true may fail to constitute knowledge. Within an environment defined by informational excess, such instability ceases to be exceptional and instead becomes systemic. As informational volume increases, the grounds for justification become progressively more fragile.
My view is that unlimited information makes knowledge systematically harder to obtain. This is not because truth disappears, but because it becomes submerged within complexity. Knowledge depends on constraint, on the ability to reduce, structure, and commit. Without these, the pursuit of knowledge dissolves into continuous selection without resolution. From this perspective, beyond a certain threshold, increasing information does not enhance knowledge. It begins to obstruct it.
