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66On the measurement of powerJournal of Philosophy 71 (8): 231-252. 1974.The aim of this paper is to develop a general strategy for measuring the relative power of individuals over any given issue. Three slightly different schemes will be proposed, all of which employ the same basic strategy. Although even the best of these schemes is not finally satisfactory, two important goals will be achieved: (1) the fundamental structure of the approach will be delineated, and (2) the nature of the refinement needed to obtain a fully adequate scheme will be clearly identified.
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286Social Epistemology: Theory and ApplicationsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 64 1-18. 2009.Epistemology has had a strongly individualist orientation, at least since Descartes. Knowledge, for Descartes, starts with the fact of one’s own thinking and with oneself as subject of that thinking. Whatever else can be known, it must be known by inference from one’s own mental contents. Achieving such knowledge is an individual, rather than a collective, enterprise. Descartes’s successors largely followed this lead, so the history of epistemology, down to our own time, has been a predominantly…Read more
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Goldman's psychologism: Review of Epistemology and Cognition (review)Erkenntnis 34 (1): 117-123. 1986.
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51Simulation and interpersonal utilityEthics 105 (4): 709-726. 1995.The aim of this article is to show how research in cognitive science is relevant to a certain theoretical issue in moral theory, namely, the legitimacy of interpersonal utility (IU) comparisons.
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1532Discrimination and perceptual knowledgeJournal of Philosophy 73 (November): 771-791. 1976.This paper presents a partial analysis of perceptual knowledge, an analysis that will, I hope, lay a foundation for a general theory of knowing. Like an earlier theory I proposed, the envisaged theory would seek to explicate the concept of knowledge by reference to the causal processes that produce (or sustain) belief. Unlike the earlier theory, however, it would abandon the requirement that a knower's belief that p be causally connected with the fact, or state of affairs, that p.
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5What is justified belief?In Steven Luper (ed.), Essential Knowledge: Readings in Epistemology, Longman. pp. 178. 1979.
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661Knowledge in a social worldOxford University Press. 1991.Knowledge in a Social World offers a philosophy for the information age. Alvin Goldman explores new frontiers by creating a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Against the tides of postmodernism and social constructionism Goldman defends the integrity of truth and shows how to promote it by well-designed forms of social interaction. From science to education, from law to democracy, he shows why and how public institutions should seek knowle…Read more
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31CommentSocial Epistemology 7 (3). 1993.The paper by Susan Feigenbaum and David Levy, 'The market for (ir)reproducible econometrics', has several meritorious features. It offers an interesting model of how econometric researchers might decide whether to replicate a previously published article and how journal editors might decide whether to publish such a replication study. It offers data about error rates involved in original studies and about the willingness of original researchers to submit their data to potential replicators. Fina…Read more
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79The real thing?The Philosophers' Magazine 43 88-93. 2008.A central group of questions are questions of an evaluative nature having to do with beliefs. What I want to say is, what we should focus on is; what are good ways of organising social practices and social institutions that are good from the point of view of what people believe, and help them get true beliefs or be informed, and then avoid making mistakes.
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1A causal theory of knowingIn Steven Luper (ed.), Essential Knowledge: Readings in Epistemology, Longman. pp. 115. 2003.
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99Pathways to knowledge: private and publicOxford University Press. 2002.How can we know? How can we attain justified belief? These traditional questions in epistemology have inspired philosophers for centuries. Now, in this exceptional work, Alvin Goldman, distinguished scholar and leader in the fields of epistemology and mind, approaches such inquiries as legitimate methods or "pathways" to knowledge. He examines the notion of private and public knowledge, arguing for the epistemic legitimacy of private and introspective methods of gaining knowledge, yet acknowledg…Read more
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103An economic model of scientific activity and truth acquisitionPhilosophical Studies 63 (1): 31-55. 1991.Economic forms of analysis have penetrated to many disciplines in the last 30 years: political science, sociology, law, social and political philosophy, and so forth. We wish to extend the economic paradigm to certain problems in epistemology and the philosophy of science. Scientific agents, and scholarly inquirers generally, act in some ways like vendors, trying to "sell" their findings, theories, analyses, or arguments to an audience of prospective "buyers". The analogy with the marketplace is…Read more
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40The Cognitive and Social Sides of EpistemologyPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986 295-311. 1986.Epistemology should accommodate both psychological and social dimensions of knowledge. My framework, called 'epistemics,' divides into individual and social epistemics. Primary individual epistemics, which is closely allied with cognitive science, studies the epistemic properties of basic cognitive operations. Examples are given, focusing on belief perseverance, imagery, deductive reasoning, and acceptance (as modeled by the "connectionist" approach). Social epistemics targets such things as com…Read more
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34Epistemology, two types of functionalism, and first-person authorityBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 395-398. 1995.My target article did not attribute a pervasive ontological significance to phenomenology, so it escapes Bogdan's “epistemological illusion.” Pust correctly pinpoints an ambiguity between content-inclusive and content-exclusive forms of folk functionalism. Contrary to Fodor, however, only the former is plausible, and hence my third argument against functionalism remains a threat. Van Brakel's charity approach to first-person authority cannot deal with authority vis-a-vis sensations, and it has s…Read more
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1132Philosophical intuitions: Their target, their source, and their epistemic statusGrazer Philosophische Studien 74 (1): 1-26. 2007.Intuitions play a critical role in analytical philosophical activity. But do they qualify as genuine evidence for the sorts of conclusions philosophers seek? Skeptical arguments against intuitions are reviewed, and a variety of ways of trying to legitimate them are considered. A defense is offered of their evidential status by showing how their evidential status can be embedded in a naturalistic framework.
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75Social Routes to Belief and KnowledgeThe Monist 84 (3): 346-367. 2001.Many of the cognitive and social sciences deal with the question of how beliefs or belief-like states are produced and transmitted to others. Let us call any account or theory of belief-formation and propagation a doxology. I don’t use that term, of course, in the religious or theological sense. Rather, I borrow the Greek term ‘doxa’ for belief or opinion, and use ‘doxology’ to mean the study or theory of belief-forming processes. How is doxology related to epistemology? Epistemology is the theo…Read more
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264Epistemology and the evidential status of introspective reports IJournal of Consciousness Studies 11 (7-8): 1-16. 2004.The question of trusting introspective reports is a question about evidential warrant or justification. It is therefore a question of epistemology, and it behoves us to approach it within the framework of epistemology, which addresses evidential warrant across a broad spectrum of topics and sources. This paper examines the scientific status of introspective reports from the vantage point of general epistemological theorizing
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25Social epistemics and social psychologySocial Epistemology 5 (2). 1991.J. Angelo Corlett suggests a revision in the scope of social epistemics as I have depicted it. Specifically, he suggests that social epistemics should encompass questions about certain psychological processes – viz. social cognitive processes – whereas my original proposal assigned the task of evaluating psychological processes to individual epistemics only. How compelling is this suggestion, and how consonant is it with the general program of epistemics?
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384Why social epistemology is real epistemologyIn Duncan Pritchard, Alan Millar & Adrian Haddock (eds.), Social Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-29. 2008.
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232Cognitive Science and MetaphysicsJournal of Philosophy 84 (10): 537-544. 1987.I want to explore the possible connections between cognitive science and metaphysics. Of course, on one philosophical taxonomy, metaphysics includes the philosophy of mind. So all contributions that cognitive science might make to philosophy of mind would equally be contributions to metaphysics. But I shall bracket that portion of metaphysics.
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38Varieties of cognitive appraisalNoûs 13 (1): 23-38. 1979.The aim of this paper is to advance a certain non-traditional approach to epistemology. My method of introducing this approach is to compare and contrast it with more familiar epistemological orientations. Thus, the format of the paper is a survey – admittedly not exhaustive – of a variety of tasks and perspectives that epistemologists have undertaken and might undertake.
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8Innate knowledgeIn Stephen P. Stich (ed.), Innate Ideas, University of California Press. pp. 111-120. 1975.
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90Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (edited book)MIT Press. 1993.This collection of readings shows how cognitive science can influence most of the primary branches of philosophy, as well as how philosophy critically examines the foundations of cognitive science. Its broad coverage extends beyond current texts that focus mainly on the impact of cognitive science on philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology, to include materials that are relevant to five other branches of philosophy: epistemology, philosophy of science (and mathematics), metaphysics, lang…Read more
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276A Program for “Naturalizing” Metaphysics, with Application to the Ontology of EventsThe Monist 90 (3): 457-479. 2007.I wish to advance a certain program for doing metaphysics, a program in which cognitive science would play an important role.1 This proposed ingredient is absent from most contemporary metaphysics. There are one or two local parts of metaphysics where a role for cognitive science is commonly accepted, but I advocate a wider range of application. I begin by laying out the general program and its rationale, with selected illustrations. Then I explore in some detail a single application: the ontolo…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |