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50The Asymmetry Thesis and the Doctrine of Normative DefeatAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 54 (4): 339-352. 2017.It is widely considered a truism that the only evidence that can provide justification for one's belief that p is evidence in one's possession. At the same time, a good many epistemologists accept another claim seemingly in tension with this "truism," to the effect that evidence not in one's possession can defeat or undermine the justification for one's belief that p. Anyone who accepts both of these claims accepts what I will call the asymmetry thesis: while evidence in one's possession can eit…Read more
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98II- Arrogance, Silence, and SilencingAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 90 (1): 93-112. 2016.Alessandra Tanesini’s insightful paper explores the moral and epistemic harms of arrogance, particularly in conversation. Of special interest to her is the phenomenon of arrogance-induced silencing, whereby one speaker’s arrogance either prevents another from speaking altogether or else undermines her capacity to produce certain speech acts such as assertions. I am broadly sympathetic to many of Tanesini’s claims about the harms associated with this sort of silencing. In this paper I propose to …Read more
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365Defending Philosophy in the Face of Systematic DisagreementIn Diego E. Machuca (ed.), Disagreement and Skepticism, Routledge. pp. 277-294. 2013.I believe that the sort of disagreements we encounter in philosophy—disagreements that often take the form that I have elsewhere called system- atic peer disagreements—make it unreasonable to think that there is any knowledge, or even justified belief, when the disagreements themselves are systematic. I readily acknowledge that this skeptical view is quite controversial; I suspect many are unconvinced. However, I will not be defending it here. Rather, I will be exploring a worry, or set of worri…Read more
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124Epistemically engineered environmentsSynthese 197 (7): 2783-2802. 2020.In other work I have defended the claim that, when we rely on other speakers by accepting what they tell us, our reliance on them differs in epistemically relevant ways from our reliance on instruments, when we rely on them by accepting what they “tell” us. However, where I have explored the former sort of reliance at great length, I have not done so with the latter. In this paper my aim is to do so. My key notions will be those of our social practices, the normative expectations that are sancti…Read more
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34Anti-Individualism: Mind and Language, Knowledge and Justification * By SANFORD C. GOLDBERG (review)Analysis 69 (3): 582-585. 2009.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 …Read more
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34Testimonial Knowledge in Early Childhood, Revisited1Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1): 1-36. 2008.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 knowle…Read more
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14Anti‐Individualism and Knowledge (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2): 515-518. 2007.
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36Word-ambiguity, world-switching, and knowledge of content: reply to BruecknerAnalysis 59 (3): 212-217. 1999.
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15Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2007.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 o…Read more
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1Transparency as Avowability: An Essay on Intentional Self-KnowledgeDissertation, Columbia University. 1995.My dissertation presents an argument for and defense of the doctrine of transparency about mental content. This doctrine holds that for any thought a thinker knows the content of her thought in an immediate and non-inferential way; and that for any thoughts a thinker can discriminate between thoughts with different contents. ;In the opening chapter I give an argument in support of the doctrine of transparency. The suggestion is that Crispin Wright's argument for a "minimalist" realism about inte…Read more
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63Comments on Miranda Fricker's Epistemic InjusticeEpisteme 7 (2): 138-150. 2010.Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice is a wide-ranging and important book on a much-neglected topic: the injustice involved in cases in which distrust arises out of prejudice. Fricker has some important things to say about this sort of injustice: its nature, how it arises, what sustains it, and the unhappy outcomes associated with it for the victim and the society in which it takes place. In the course of developing this account, Fricker also develops an account of the epistemology of testimony…Read more
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113Radical interpretation, understanding, and the testimonial transmission of knowledgeSynthese 138 (3). 2004.In this paper I argue that RadicalInterpretation (RI), taken to be a methodological doctrine regarding the conditions under which an interpretation of an utterance is both warranted and correct, has unacceptable implications for the conditions on (ascriptions of) understanding. The notion of understanding at play is that which underwrites the testimonial transmission of knowledge. After developing this notion I argue that, on the assumption of RI, hearers will fail to have such understanding in …Read more
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IntroductionIn Internalism and externalism in semantics and epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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2The Knowledge Account of Assertion and the Conditions on Testimonial KnowledgeIn Duncan Pritchard & Patrick Greenough (eds.), Williamson on Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009.
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139Epistemic extendedness, testimony, and the epistemology of instrument-based beliefPhilosophical Explorations 15 (2). 2012.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 argu…Read more
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142Self‐ascription, Self‐knowledge, and the Memory ArgumentAnalysis 57 (3): 211-219. 1997.is tendentious. (Throughout this paper I shall refer to this claim as
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202Comments on Miranda Fricker's Epistemic InjusticeEpisteme 7 (2): 138-150. 2010.Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice is a wide-ranging and important book on a much-neglected topic: the injustice involved in cases in which distrust arises out of prejudice. Fricker has some important things to say about this sort of injustice: its nature, how it arises, what sustains it, and the unhappy outcomes associated with it for the victim and the society in which it takes place. In the course of developing this account, Fricker also develops an account of the epistemology of testimony…Read more
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3Reductionism and the distinctiveness of testimonial knowledgeIn Jennifer Lackey & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Epistemology of Testimony, Oxford University Press. pp. 127--44. 2006.
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136Anti-Individualism: Mind and Language, Knowledge and JustificationCambridge University Press. 2007.Sanford C. Goldberg argues that a proper account of the communication of knowledge through speech has anti-individualistic implications for both epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language. In Part I he offers a novel argument for anti-individualism about mind and language, the view that the contents of one's thoughts and the meanings of one's words depend for their individuation on one's social and natural environment. In Part II he discusses the epistemic dimension of knowledge commun…Read more
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1Work: The Case of TestimonyIn Jessica Brown & Herman Cappelen (eds.), Assertion: New Philosophical Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 175. 2011.
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103Inclusiveness in the face of anticipated disagreementSynthese 190 (7): 1189-1207. 2013.This paper discusses the epistemic outcomes of following a belief-forming policy of inclusiveness under conditions in which one anticipates systematic disagreement with one’s interlocutors. These cases highlight the possibility of distinctly epistemic costs of inclusiveness, in the form of lost knowledge of or a diminishment in one’s rational confidence in a proposition. It is somewhat controversial whether following a policy of inclusiveness under such circumstances will have such costs; this w…Read more
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24Externalism, Self-Knowledge, and Skepticism: New Essays (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2015.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 p…Read more
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126Testimonially based knowledge from false testimonyPhilosophical Quarterly 51 (205): 512-526. 2001.Philosophical Quarterly 51:205, 512-26 (October 2001).
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |