Sanford Goldberg

Many epistemologists agree that even very young children sometimes acquire knowledge through testimony. In this paper I address two challenges facing this view. The first (building on a point made in Lackey (2005)) is the defeater challenge, which is to square the hypothesis that very young children acquire testimonial knowledge with the fact that children (whose cognitive immaturity prevents them from having or appreciating reasons) cannot be said to satisfy the No‐Defeaters condition on knowledge. The second is the extension challenge, which is to give a motivated, extensionally‐adequate account of the conditions on testimonial knowledge in early childhood. Neither challenge can be met merely by endorsing externalism about knowledge; but we can meet both by reconceiving the process that eventuates in the child’s consumption of testimony. My central thesis is that this process should be seen as implicating features of the child’s social environment. The result is a novel anti‐individualistic externalism about knowledge.

Reflection on testimony provides novel arguments for anti-individualism. What is anti-individualism? Sanford Goldberg's book defends three main claims under this heading: first, facts about the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers ; second, an individual's epistemic entitlement to accept a piece of testimony depends on facts about her peers ; third, processes by which some humans acquire knowledge from testimony includes activities performed for them by others. Each of these three claims is argued for separately from premises about the ways in which humans, adult and child, succeed in gaining knowledge by testimony. The three arguments provide the structure for Anti-Individualism.Goldberg's argument for the first claim – that the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers – begins from uncontroversial facts about testimony. Gaining knowledge by testimony depends on knowing the meanings of some utterances, and it is possible to know the meaning of a person's utterance while knowing little that would distinguish this person from anyone else. The best explanation of how this is possible involves postulating linguistic norms which entail facts about the linguistic meanings of utterances. Now in some cases of testimony, a hearer acquires a belief whose content is the linguistic meaning of a speaker's utterance, where the linguistic meaning of this utterance is determined by linguistic norms. But linguistic norms might have been different from what they are even while the person's and her audience's non-relational properties remained unaltered. And in such a case, the hearer would have acquired a belief with a different content. Therefore, ‘Psychological facts such as believing that p do not supervene on the individualistic facts regarding the subject’ …

Assertions belong to the family of speech acts that make claims regarding how things are. They include statements, avowals, reports, expressed judgments, and testimonies—acts which are relevant across a host of issues not only in philosophy of language and linguistics but also in subdisciplines such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Over the past two decades, the amount of scholarship investigating the speech act of assertion has increased dramatically, and the scope of such research has also grown. The Oxford Handbook of Assertion explores various dimensions of the act of assertion: its nature; its place in a theory of speech acts, and in semantics and meta-semantics; its role in epistemology; and the various social, political, and ethical dimensions of the act. Essays from leading theorists situate assertion in relation to other types of speech acts, exploring the connection between assertions and other phenomena of interest not only to philosophers but also to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, lawyers, computer scientists, and theorists from communication studies.

This paper aims to provide a novel response on behalf of Process Reliabilism to the Swamping Problem. Unlike previous responses, the present response does not involve conditional probabilities (as Goldman and Olsson do), it does not appeal to permissivism or attitudes towards epistemic risk (as Pettigrew does), it will not depend on the generality of the problem (as Carter and Jarvis do) and it does not embrace either evidentialism or evidence monism (as Bjelde does). Instead it appeals to the modal properties of those beliefs formed through reliable process-types. What is more, the argument is generalizable: while I will frame my conclusion in Process Reliabilist terms, it should be of interest to anyone who is a truth monist regarding epistemic value.

Written by an international team of leading scholars, this collection of thirteen new essays explores the implications of semantic externalism for self-knowledge and skepticism, bringing recent developments in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and epistemology to bear on the issue. Structured in three parts, the collection looks at self-knowledge, content transparency, and then meta-semantics and the nature of mental content. The chapters examine a wide range of topics in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, including 2D semantics, transparency views of self-knowledge, and theories of linguistic understanding, as well as epistemological debates on contextualism, contrastivism, pragmatic encroachment, anti-luminosity arguments and testimony. The scope of the volume will appeal to graduate students and researchers in epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, cognitive science, psychology and linguistics.

Assertions belong to the family of speech acts that make claims regarding how things are. They include statements, avowals, reports, expressed judgments, and testimonies - acts which are relevant across a host of issues not only in philosophy of language and linguistics but also in subdisciplines such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Over the past two decades, the amount of scholarship investigating the speech act of assertion has increased dramatically, and the scope of such research has also grown. The Oxford Handbook of Assertion explores various dimensions of the act of assertion: its nature; its place in a theory of speech acts, and in semantics and meta-semantics; its role in epistemology; and the various social, political, and ethical dimensions of the act. Essays from leading theorists situate assertion in relation to other types of speech acts, exploring the connection between assertions and other phenomena of interest not only to philosophers but also to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, lawyers, computer scientists, and theorists from communication studies.

Marina Sbisà has long advocated that we think of the illocutionary force of a speech act in terms of the act’s (predictable) systematic effects on the normative relationship between a speaker and her audience. Building on this idea, I argue that the hypothesis of distinctive speech act norms can be used to explain how participants in a conversation coordinate the normative expectations they have of one another in conversation. Such an explanation earns its keep by explaining how speakers render themselves illocutionarily intelligible to their audiences—thereby enabling us to articulate the sense of mutuality that characterizes speech exchanges. One important upshot of my reflections is that we should reject both Austin’s thesis that the successful performance of an illocutionary act depends on audience uptake and Sbisà’s claim that Austin’s thesis is required if we are to make sense of the illocutionary dimension of speech in terms of an act’s systematic effects on participants’ normative expectations of one another.

Searle’s (1963/1991) account of the communicative intentions in speech acts purports to be an advance over that of Grice (1957), in acknowledging the ineliminable role of the linguistic (usage) rules in enabling the hearer to recognize the speaker’s communicative intentions. In this paper we argue that, given some plausible assumptions about ordinary speech exchanges, Searle’s insight on this score is incompatible with his (1983) commitment to internalism in the philosophy of mind. As a result, Searle cannot have it both ways: either he must give up his core insight regarding the ineliminable role of linguistic (usage) rules in the hearer’s recognition of a speaker’s communicative intentions, or he must give up his commitment to internalism the philosophy of mind. We conclude by arguing that this lesson is generic: the forced choice is one thatalltheorists must face, insofar as we theorize about the role of language in the communication of thought through speech.

To what extent are meaning, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, determined by aspects of the 'outside world'? Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology presents twelve specially written essays exploring these debates in metaphysics and epistemology and the connections between them. In so doing, it examines how issues connected with the nature of mind and language bear on issues about the nature of knowledge and justification. Topics discussed include the compatibility of semantic externalism and epistemic internalism, the variety of internalist and externalist positions, semantic externalism's implications for the epistemology of reasoning and reflection, and the possibility of arguments from the theory of mental content to the theory of epistemic justification.

Assertions belong to the family of speech acts that make claims regarding how things are. They include statements, avowals, reports, expressed judgments, and testimonies—acts which are relevant across a host of issues not only in philosophy of language and linguistics but also in subdisciplines such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Over the past two decades, the amount of scholarship investigating the speech act of assertion has increased dramatically, and the scope of such research has also grown. The Oxford Handbook of Assertion explores various dimensions of the act of assertion: its nature; its place in a theory of speech acts, and in semantics and meta-semantics; its role in epistemology; and the various social, political, and ethical dimensions of the act. Essays from leading theorists situate assertion in relation to other types of speech acts, exploring the connection between assertions and other phenomena of interest not only to philosophers but also to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, lawyers, computer scientists, and theorists from communication studies.

The scenario of the brain in a vat, first aired thirty-five years ago in Hilary Putnam's classic paper, has been deeply influential in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics. This collection of new essays examines the scenario and its philosophical ramifications and applications, as well as the challenges which it has faced. The essays review historical applications of the brain-in-a-vat scenario and consider its impact on contemporary debates. They explore a diverse range of philosophical issues, from intentionality, external-world scepticism, and the nature of truth, to the extended mind hypothesis, reference magnetism, and new versions of realism. The volume will be a rich and valuable resource for advanced students in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and language, as well as anyone interested in the relations between language, thought and the world

The process of education, and in particular that involving very young children, often involves students' taking their teachers' word on a good many things. At the same time, good education at every level ought to inculcate, develop, and support students' ability to think for themselves. While these two features of education need not be regarded as contradictory, it is not clear how they relate to one another, nor is it clear how (when taken together) these features ought to bear on educational practice itself. This article, which is largely programmatic, aims to provide tentative answers to these questions.