Sanford Goldberg

In their chapter “Knowledge, Practical Adequacy, and Stakes,” Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne present several challenges to the doctrine of pragmatic encroachment. In this brief reply to their chapter two things are aimed at. First, the chapter argues that there is a sense in which their case against pragmatic encroachment is a bit weaker, and another sense in which that case is much stronger, than Anderson and Hawthorne’s own argument would suggest. Second, the chapter highlights and then builds upon their extremely interesting reflections on one sort of practical matter that has not received proper attention in the literature: the epistemic significance of double-checking. This is done with an eye towards pointing in the direction of further work.

In this paper I will be appealing to a prior grasp of the normativity of knowledge itself—its role in entitling a subject to confidence and in authorizing others to believe on the strength of one’s epistemic standing—to shed light on the nature and scope of defeat. The strategy will be to focus on cases in which an otherwise epistemically well-positioned subject fails to enjoy these normative standings, and to argue that the best explanation is the presence of defeaters. In ordinary cases, this strategy yields results that are not particularly interesting: in such cases the allegation of relevant defeaters will be greeted with a yawn. The interest of the present paper lies in its use of this strategy to motivate the allegation of a type of defeat that is decidedly more controversial: so-called normative defeat (a term I borrow from Lackey (1999)). Highlighting this type of defeat underscores a social dimension to knowledge that the literature typically overlooks or ignores.

Fake news poses an interesting test case to theories of the epistemology of testimony. If they are to illuminate the nature of the epistemic challenges and harms fake news poses to (members of) a community, the theories themselves must move beyond several overly simplistic models of communication. After developing and criticizing some of these, this chapter goes on to offer a more nearly adequate model. The distinctive feature of the theory presented is that it goes beyond the reporter (speaker) and recipient (hearer), postulating several other roles people (and technology) play in communication. The upshot of these reflections is a case for thinking of epistemic responsibility in _distinctly social terms_—in terms of _what we owe to each other_ as creatures who are both information-seeking and highly social.

Internalist justification is standardly motivated by appeal to the New Evil Demon intuition. In this chapter it is argued that the Demon-proofing of justification comes at a great cost. Assuming that if S’s belief that p enjoys a ‘Demon-proof’ justification, then the strength of S’s epistemic position is no greater than the epistemically worst-off of S’s doppelgangers, the burden of the argument is to show that the Demon can wreak havoc on the epistemic robustness of S’s doppelgangers. In this way the trope of the Demon can be used to show how weak internalist justification actually is, when it is formulated so as to meet the constraint of the New Evil Demon intuition. This (admittedly familiar) point will be brought out in a distinctly metaepistemological fashion; hopefully, this will bring new light to a traditional topic, and will honor the seminal epistemological work of Richard Fumerton.

In this paper Sanford Goldberg argues that the sort of systematic disagreements we encounter in philosophy presents us with a problem regarding assertoric practice in philosophy. The argument aims to show that acknowledged systematic disagreement generates a defeater, with the result that beliefs in propositions under conditions of acknowledged systematic disagreement are not doxastically justified; so if the norm of assertion requires anything as strong as justification, we are not warranted in making assertions under such conditions. After developing the nature of this problem, Goldberg concludes with a brief suggestion as to how we might respond to it.

This chapter examines the ethical dimension of the practice of assertion, both in making and in receiving an assertion, and its connection to the ethics of belief. It argues that on the plausible assumption that the speech act of assertion has an epistemic norm, we can account for the ethical dimension of the practice in terms of the reasonable expectations that hearers have of asserters, and that asserters have of hearers. Further, it argues that the ethics of assertion informs the ethics of belief. Since assertion is one predominate way meeting another’s informational needs, it argues that one’s beliefs should be such that they are properly assertable should the need for such information arise. This, it is argued, places constraints on both higher-order and first-order beliefs.

Many people agree that a proper epistemological treatment of testimonial knowledge will regard testimonial warrant — the total truth‐conducive support enjoyed by a belief grounded on a piece of testimony — as socially diffuse, in the sense that it is not something that supervenes on the proper functionality of the hearer's cognitive resources together with the reasons she has for accepting the testimony. After arguing for such a view, I go on to identify a challenge many people think flows from an acknowledgment of the social diffusion of warrant. In particular, such an acknowledgment appears to preclude a happy account of the rationality of testimony‐based belief. After identifying the nature of this challenge and the various positions that one can take on it, I develop a response according to which rationality itself (like warrant) is socially diffuse.

Those interested in securing the compatibility of anti‐individualism and introspective knowledge of content (henceforth ‘compatibilists’) typically make a distinction between knowledge of content proper (KC) and discriminatory knowledge of content (DKC). Following Falvey and Owens (1994), most compatibilists allow that anti‐individualism is not compatible with introspective DKC, but maintain that nonetheless anti‐individualism is compatible with introspective KC. Though I have raised doubts about the compatibility of anti‐individualism and introspective KC elsewhere (Goldberg, 1997 and forthcoming), here my aim is to suggest the philosophical relevance of DKC itself. My thesis is that there are cases in which a thinker’s failing to have DKC will affect the justification which she takes herself to have in drawing various inferences in the course of her reasoning, and so will affect that reasoning itself. After presenting illustrative examples and suggesting why anti‐individualists themselves ought to acknowledge this point, I suggest that the examples indicate further work for anti‐individualists: formulating what it takes to have DKC, and substantiating the view (widely held by anti‐individualists) that anti‐individualism’s implication that we (often) lack such knowledge is not to be taken as an important weakness of anti‐individualism itself.

Scientific understanding typically involves multiple specialists performing interdependent tasks. According to several social–epistemological accounts, this suggests that scientific communities are collective epistemic subjects. We argue instead that the data does not warrant the postulation of a collective subject. Our position, rather, is fictionalist: we argue that the use of sentences attributing understanding to scientific communities amounts to loose talk which is best construed as indicating how social environments associated with a scientific community promote individual scientists' understanding.

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.

ABSTRACT A theory of group evidence is an account of the conditions under which a piece of evidence counts as being possessed by a group. In her book GROUPS AS MORAL AND EPISTEMIC AGENTS (Oxford, 2024), Jessica Brown has argued that any adequate account must impose a doxastic constraint on group evidence. She has used this constraint, together with other arguments in her book, to defend a non-summative account of group evidence on which a group does not have the evidence that p unless (relevant) members broadcast the evidence that p to the group. But such a view faces a difficulty anticipated by Jennifer Lackey: groups may incorporate practices on which member evidence is systematically withheld from the group e.g. when it is not in the group’s interest to have that evidence. After arguing that Brown’s way of addressing this problem (by appeal to the notion of group-level normative defeat) is not satisfactory, I argue that we do better to recognize a weaker doxastic constraint than the one proposed by Brown herself. Such a view avoids the problem Brown’s account faces, squares with the various desiderata Brown imposes on an account of group evidence, and enjoys other independent virtues.

Several influential thought experiments from Harman 1973 purport to show that unpossessed evidence can undermine knowledge. Recently, some epistemologists have appealed to these thought experiments in defense of a logically stronger thesis: unpossessed evidence can defeat justification. But these appeals fail to appreciate that Harman himself thought of his examples as Gettier cases, and so would have rejected this strengthening of his thesis. On the contrary, he would have held that while unpossessed evidence can undermine knowledge, it leaves justification intact. In this paper I seek to undermine the viability of Harman’s position. If this is correct, contemporary epistemology faces a choice: either we reject that unpossessed evidence in Harman-style cases bears on knowledge _at all_, or else we must allow that it undermines knowledge _by defeating justification_. The former option must explain why Harman’s thought experiments elicit strong ‘no knowledge’ intuitions; the latter option embraces a minority view about the bearing of social expectations on the assessment of knowledge _and justification_ (= the doctrine of normative defeat).

At first blush, Sosa’s performance-based approach to epistemic normativity would seem to put us in a position to illuminate important types of epistemic negligence – types whose epistemic significance will be denied by standard evidentialist theories. But while Sosa’s theory does indeed venture beyond standard evidentialism, it fails to provide an adequate account of epistemic negligence. The challenge arises in cases in which a subject is negligent in that she knowingly fails to perform inquiries which it was her responsibility to perform, but where she had good (undefeated) reason to believe that had she done so her judgment would only have been reinforced, and where this higher-order judgment was apt. After arguing that these cases will pose problems for Sosa’s view, I diagnose the difficulty as one that will face any view that treats epistemic negligence either in exclusively performance-theoretic terms or exclusively evidential terms.

In this paper I argue that treating organized groups as agents, in the way Lackey proposes to do, has implications that are more far-reaching than appears to be recognized in Lackey’s book itself. To bring this out I discuss (1) the epistemic significance of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, (2) a potential counterexample to her Group Epistemic Agent account of group justification, and (3) the bearing of group agency (as understood by Lackey) on the scope of the domain of group epistemology. None of the points I am making is a decisive objection to the general framework Lackey adopts in her book; I offer them, instead, in an attempt to situate Lackey’s epistemology of groups into a more inclusive social epistemology framework.