To me it seems useful to distinguish two different senses of ‘containing knowledge’, and that some of your examples implicitly assume different senses. Sense 1: How much knowledge a region contains, regardless of whether an agent in fact has access to it (This is the sense in which the sunken map does contain knowledge) and 2. How much knowledge a region contains and how easily a given agent can physically get information about the relevant state of the region in order to ‘extract’ the knowledge it contains (This is the sense in which the go-kart with a data recorder does not contain a lot of knowledge).
If we don’t make this distinction, it seems like either both or neither of the sunken map and go kart with data recorder examples should be said to contain knowledge. You make an argument that the sunken map should count as containing knowledge, but it seems like we could apply the same reasoning to the go-kart with data recorder:
“We could board the ship and see an accurate map being drawn. It would be strange to deny that this map constitutes knowledge simply because it wasn’t later used for some instrumental purpose.”
becomes
“We could retrieve the data recorder and see accurate sensor recordings being made. It would be strange to deny that this data recorder constitutes knowledge simply because it wasn’t later used for some instrumental purpose.”
Though there does seem to be a separate quantitative distinction between these two cases, which is something like “Once you know the configuration of the region in question (map or data recorder), how much computation do you have to do in order to be able to use it for improving your decisions about what turns to make.” (Map has lower computation needed, data recorder has more as you need to compute the track shape from the sensor data). But this ‘amount of computation’ distinction is different to the distinction you make about ‘is it used for an instrumental purpose’.
To me it seems useful to distinguish two different senses of ‘containing knowledge’, and that some of your examples implicitly assume different senses. Sense 1: How much knowledge a region contains, regardless of whether an agent in fact has access to it (This is the sense in which the sunken map does contain knowledge) and 2. How much knowledge a region contains and how easily a given agent can physically get information about the relevant state of the region in order to ‘extract’ the knowledge it contains (This is the sense in which the go-kart with a data recorder does not contain a lot of knowledge).
If we don’t make this distinction, it seems like either both or neither of the sunken map and go kart with data recorder examples should be said to contain knowledge. You make an argument that the sunken map should count as containing knowledge, but it seems like we could apply the same reasoning to the go-kart with data recorder:
“We could board the ship and see an accurate map being drawn. It would be strange to deny that this map constitutes knowledge simply because it wasn’t later used for some instrumental purpose.”
becomes
“We could retrieve the data recorder and see accurate sensor recordings being made. It would be strange to deny that this data recorder constitutes knowledge simply because it wasn’t later used for some instrumental purpose.”
Though there does seem to be a separate quantitative distinction between these two cases, which is something like “Once you know the configuration of the region in question (map or data recorder), how much computation do you have to do in order to be able to use it for improving your decisions about what turns to make.” (Map has lower computation needed, data recorder has more as you need to compute the track shape from the sensor data). But this ‘amount of computation’ distinction is different to the distinction you make about ‘is it used for an instrumental purpose’.