Sanford Goldberg

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.

Most discussions of the knowledge account of assertion focus on the perspective of the speaker: they ask whether the knowledge account provides a plausible characterization of the conditions under which it is appropriate to make an assertion. But it is noteworthy that we can take another perspective: that of the hearer, who consumes assertion. This chapter examines the suggestion that the knowledge account enjoys an unappreciated virtue in this respect. The unappreciated virtue is that the knowledge account yields a simple and highly attractive account of knowledge through testimony. After outlining how such an account might go, the chapter suggests that it is premature to conclude that the knowledge account enjoys the virtue in question. This is because such an account involves empirical assumptions regarding the conditions under which hearers accept observed assertion, and we have some reason to think that these assumptions are less true to the facts than are the corresponding empirical assumptions of competitor accounts. This result does not call the knowledge account of assertion into question, but it does suggest that this account cannot yet claim what otherwise might have seemed an important, and heretofore unrecognized, virtue.

In Relying on others [Goldberg, S. 2010a. Relying on others: An essay in epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press], I argued that, from the perspective of an interest in epistemic assessment, the testimonial belief-forming process should be regarded as interpersonally extended. At the same time, I explicitly rejected the extendedness model for beliefs formed through reliance on a mere mechanism, such as a clock. In this paper, I try to bolster my defense of this asymmetric treatment. I argue that a crucial assumption lying behind the argument I used to establish interpersonal extendedness in testimony cases does not apply to beliefs formed through reliance on instruments. In this respect, at least, there appears to be something epistemically distinctive about relying on another epistemic agent