Sanford Goldberg

In his Beyond Justification, Bill Alston argued that there is no single property picked out by ‘epistemic justification,’ and that instead epistemological theory should investigate the range of epistemic desiderata that beliefs may enjoy (as well as the nature of and interconnections among the various epistemic good-making properties). In this paper I argue that none of his arguments taken singly, nor the collection as a group, gives us a reason to abandon the traditional idea that there is a property of epistemic justification. I conclude by suggesting how Alston’s proposal to investigate the variety of epistemic desiderata bears on the questions at the heart of the theory of epistemic justification. Here I suggest that, despite his attempts at neutrality with respect to debates about epistemic justification, Alston might well have taken sides on one of the main issues of substance.

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.

ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that there are possible cases in which the demands of justice and the norms of epistemology cannot be simultaneously satisfied. I will bring out these normative clashes in terms of the now-familiar phenomenon of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007). While the resulting argument is very much in the spirit of two other sorts of argument that have received sustained attention recently – arguments alleging epistemic partiality in friendship, and arguments that motivate the hypothesis of moral encroachment on the epistemic – I suggest how the argument from epistemic injustice differs from, and is stronger than, both of those arguments. The implications of the present argument are several: we must (i) reconceive the role of identity-prejudice in testimonial injustice, (ii) modify the way we think about how justice and epistemology bear on testimonial transactions, and (iii) understand the mutuality of speech exchanges in ways that do not privilege any particular participant’s epistemic perspective.

We present a novel kind of “socio-functional” foundationalism rooted in the division of scientific labor. Our foundationalism is social in that it involves a socio-epistemic phenomenon we dub epistemic outsourcing, whereby claims from one group of scientists provide epistemological foundations for another group of scientists. We argue that: (1) epistemic outsourcing results in a legitimate form of epistemic foundationalism, (2) this sort of foundationalism can be used to shed light on the epistemology of measurement; and (3) epistemic outsourcing is a distinctively collective epistemic phenomenon.

According to anti‐reductionism, audiences have a default (but defeasible) epistemic entitlement to accept observed testimony. This paper explores the prospects of arguing from this premise to a conclusion in ethics, to the effect that speakers enjoy a default (but defeasible) moral entitlement to expect to be trusted when they testify. After proposing what I regard as the best attempt to link the two, I conclude that any argument from the one to the other will depend on a strong epistemological assumption that has not yet been discussed in this connection.

In his Beyond Justification, Bill Alston argued that there is no single property picked out by ‘epistemic justification,’ and that instead epistemological theory should investigate the range of epistemic desiderata that beliefs may enjoy (as well as the nature of and interconnections among the various epistemic good-making properties). In this paper I argue that none of his arguments taken singly, nor the collection as a group, gives us a reason to abandon the traditional idea that there is a property of epistemic justification. I conclude by suggesting how Alston’s proposal to investigate the variety of epistemic desiderata bears on the questions at the heart of the theory of epistemic justification. Here I suggest that, despite his attempts at neutrality with respect to debates about epistemic justification, Alston might well have taken sides on one of the main issues of substance.

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. Focusing my attention on that account, my central claims are two. First, at least some of Fricker's arguments against existing (inferentialist and non-inferentialist) views in the epistemology of testimony are less than fully persuasive, and the (non-inferentialist) view she ends up endorsing is not all that different from the views she criticizes. Second, her reasons for harboring doubts regarding the role of a principle of default entitlement within a non-inferentialist account are not persuasive. Neither of these claims affects the overall argument Fricker is trying to run. Rather, they suggest that Fricker may have picked more fights than she needed to in the epistemology of testimony. If so, we have reason to detach Fricker's important work on epistemic injustice from some of the details of the story she tells regarding the epistemology of testimony.

Among epistemologists, it is common to assume that insofar as coherence bears on the justification of belief, the only relevant coherence relations are those _within_ an individual subject’s web of beliefs. After clarifying this view and exploring some plausible motivations for it, we argue that this individualistic account of the epistemic relevance of coherence fails to account for central facets of scientific practice. In its place we propose a social account of coherence. According to the view we propose, a scientist _S_’s belief that _p_ is _prima facie_ unjustified if this belief negatively coheres with justified scientific claims in her scientific community. This account of coherence yields an epistemology for scientific belief which, we argue, has all of the benefits and none of the liabilities of its more individualistic predecessor.

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

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 either enhance or detract from justification, evidence not in one's possession can only detract from it. The asymmetry thesis is not uncontroversial; but any epistemologist who endorses the doctrine of normative defeat will be under tremendous pressure to accept it. In this paper I try to motivate the asymmetry thesis in two steps: first, by appeal to a feature that assessments of justification share with evaluative assessments generally, according to which we can distinguish generic expectations in play from the explicit criteria for satisfying the relevant evaluative standard; and second, by arguing that when it comes to epistemic assessments, the generic expectations themselves derive from our roles as epistemic agents in communities in which we depend on one another for knowledge.

This paper develops a normative account of epistemic luck, according to which the luckiness of epistemic luck is analyzed in terms of the expectations a subject is entitled to have when she satisfies the standards of epistemic justification. This account enables us to distinguish three types of epistemic luck—bad, good, and sheer—and to model the roles they play e.g. in Gettierization. One controversial aspect of the proposed account is that it is non‐reductive. While other approaches analyze epistemic luck in non‐epistemic terms—either in modal terms (lack of safety) or in agential terms (lack of creditworthiness)—I argue that the non‐reductive nature of the normative account is actually a selling‐point relative to its competitors.

In this paper, I am interested in skepticism’s downstream effects on further inquiry. To account for these downstream effects, we need to distinguish the reasons for doubting whether p, one’s other background beliefs bearing on the prospects that further inquiry would improve one’s epistemic position on p, and the value one assigns to determining whether p. I advance two claims regarding skepticism’s downstream effects on inquiry. First, it is characteristic of “radical” forms of skepticism that is sufficient to undermine the prospect described in. By contrast, ordinary forms of skepticism, which can be identified in connection with, can actually be a boon to inquiry by enhancing. In such cases, having reasons for skeptical doubt is not merely compatible with inquiring further, but also serves to motivate and to help frame such inquiry.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 128-130 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy Robert Hanna. Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 312. Cloth, $65.00. Robert Hanna's book has an ambitious two-fold agenda. Its historical agenda is to prompt a reassessment of the role Kant played in the foundations of analytic philosophy. The ideological agenda is to reassess the status of the relevant Kantian doctrines--in particular, his views regarding the nature of necessity, the analytic-synthetic distinction, and the nature and scope of the a priori--in the face of what Hanna takes to be the "crisis" (11) facing analytic philosophy today. Hanna views the elements of this two-fold agenda as inextricably [End Page 128] linked: when we see how the analysts failed to appreciate much of the subtlety and power of Kant's arguments, we will be in a position both to appreciate why the early analysts were not able to bring their official projects to completion, and to reassess the plausibility of various Kantian doctrines that have been considered untouchable during the dominance of analytic philosophy.Hanna's Kant, the Kant of the first Critique, is bent on answering two fundamental problems regarding the nature of cognition. Hanna characterizes the first problem as the "modal" problem, that of saying how the same judgment "can... be at once necessarily true, refer to the real or natural world in a substantive way, yet cognizable to creatures minded like us apart from all sense experience" (1). The second problem is the "semantic" problem, that of stating "how meanings are possible" (3). Hanna's book is organized around his characterization of Kant's answers to these questions and his defense of the resulting position in the face of the analytic tradition's reaction.In assessing Kant's role in the analytic tradition, Hanna borrows much from previous historically sensitive philosophers interested in this period. Three such authors figure prominently: Coffa and his seminal book The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap; Friedman (with special attention to his Reconsidering Logical Positivism); and Dummett (whose work on Frege is cited throughout). From Coffa and Friedman, Hanna endorses the thesis that at its core the analytic tradition is a reaction to the Kantian conception of the a priori. Hanna accepts as well that the early analysts were united by the aim of exploiting technical developments in logic and semantics as part of a case against Kant's conception of the a priori. Where Hanna disagrees with, e.g., Coffa is over the status of the analysts' anti-Kantian arguments: where Coffa appears to endorse the cogency of those arguments, Hanna suggests that Kant's position is much more defensible, and the analysts' positions and arguments much more vulnerable, than has previously been thought.It is worth noting some of the many virtues of Foundations. Hanna makes an interesting case for the idea that at a certain level of description there is an important agreement between Kant and Frege regarding the evils of psychologism about logic. This will come as news to those who have treated Kant as among the targets in Frege's critique of psychologism. In addition, Hanna develops Kant's conception of analyticity and presents a robust defense of that conception against some prevalent criticisms; proffers an intriguing comparison between Kant's pure intuition and Wittgenstein's view of the transcendental nature of logic (221-3); and makes a plausible case for the provocative conclusion that the conceptualism of early analytic philosophy is in contrast with Frege's own philosophical attitude (233).At the same time, some complaints are worth registering. To those (like me) who do not encounter Kantian vocabulary on a regular basis, Hanna's reliance on that vocabulary has the effect of rendering many passages heavy-going and difficult to unpack. (While Hanna does attempt to provide explications of the vocabulary, I sometimes found these explications themselves to be difficult to understand.) Secondly, Hanna is sometimes...

This volume collects twelve essays by Sanford C. Goldberg on the topic of social epistemology. The collection falls into two halves: the first half develops a proposal for a programme for social epistemology, its animating vision, foundational questions, and core concepts; the other half focuses on applications of this programme to particular topics. Goldberg characterizes the research programme as the exploration of the epistemic significance of other minds. This programme is dedicated to an examination of the various ways in which we depend epistemically on others, and to describe the proper way to evaluate beliefs according to the sort of dependence they exhibit. It thus provides the basis for identifying and characterizing various dysfunctions of our epistemic communities. The programme is put into practice by exploring such topics as the epistemic agency exhibited in inquiry, the practices that constitute news coverage, the basis for allegations of what we or others should have known, how reliance on another's testimony contrasts with reliance on an instrument, our reliance on others as consumers of testimony, and the epistemic significance of non-epistemic social norms--moral, political, professional, or relationship-based.

Speech reports of the form ‘A said that p’ are sometimes used by a speaker S as a reason in support of S’s own claim to know that p – in particular, when S’s claim to know is made on the basis of A’s testimony. In this paper I appeal to intuitions regarding the epistemology of testimony to argue that such ‘testimonial’ uses of speech reports ought to be ascribed their strict de dicto truth conditions. This result is then used as the basis for the claim that, no matter how they are used, all speech reports of this form ought to be ascribed their strict de dicto truth conditions. I conclude by offering a characterization of the content of the notions of saying and what is said, and by making some programmatic remarks regarding the role of these notions in semantic theory.

There are all sorts of normative expectations in epistemology—expectations about the epistemic condition of other subjects—that would appear to be relevant to epistemic assessment in ways that do not conform to epistemic standards as traditionally understood. The expectations in question include expectations of inquiries pursued or completed, expectations of certain competences, professional expectations, expectations of having consulted with experts, institutional expectations, moral expectations, expectations of friends, and so forth. My goals in this paper are two. First, I aim to highlight the prevalence of such expectations, and the range of distinct types of circumstance in which they arise. Second, I assess several responses to the allegation that normative epistemic expectations are relevant to epistemic assessment. These range from “explaining away” the appearances to trying to offer one or another positive account of their significance. The former sort of reaction comes at a greater cost than many appear to appreciate, given the prevalence of these expectations and the range of circumstances in which they arise. The latter sort of reaction comes at the cost of having to revise our account of epistemic assessment itself. My own favored view does so in terms of the doctrine of normative defeat; I present my reasons for preferring this view, though I cannot claim in this paper to vindicate it.