Alvin Goldman

Epistemology needs a social branch to complement its traditional, ‘individualist’ branch. Like its individualist sister, social epistemology would be an evaluative enterprise. It would assess (actual and possible) social practices in terms of their propensities to promote or inhibit knowledge, where knowledge is understood in the sense of true belief. Social epistemology should examine the practices of many types of players, as well as technological and institutional structures: speakers, hearers, gate-keepers of communication (e.g., editors, publishers, referees), communication technologies and their applications, and legal and economic arrangements that influence the epistemic quality of public speech. A mixture of analytical tools should be employed to assess practices in terms of their likely knowledge outcomes, tools that include Bayesian probability theory, economic theory, and empirical inquiry.

Sherrilyn Roush’s Tracking Truth (2005) is an impressive, precision-crafted work. Although it sets out to rehabilitate the epistemological theory of Robert Nozick’s "Philosophical Explanations" (1981), its departures from Nozick’s line are extensive and original enough that it should be regarded as a distinct form of epistemological externalism. Roush’s mission is to develop an externalism that averts the problems and counterexamples encountered not only by Nozick’s theory but by other varieties of externalism as well. Roush advances both a theory of knowledge and a theory of evidence; I focus entirely on knowledge. I shall pinpoint a few respects in which Roush’s theory is not wholly successful. In particular, it works less well than process- (or method-) oriented externalisms like process reliabilism.

Epistemology has recently witnessed a number of efforts to rehabilitate rationalism, to defend the existence and importance of a priori knowledge or warrant construed as the product of rational insight or apprehension (Bealer 1987; Bigelow 1992; BonJour 1992, 1998; Burge 1998; Butchvarov 1970; Katz 1998; Plantinga 1993). This effort has sometimes been coupled with an attack on naturalistic epistemology, especially in BonJour 1994 and Katz 1998. Such coupling is not surprising, because naturalistic epistemology is often associated with thoroughgoing empiricism and the rejection of the a priori. In this paper, however, I shall present a conception of naturalistic epistemology that is entirely compatible with a priori justification or knowledge. The resulting conception, I claim, gives us a better appreciation of the respective merits of the rational and the empirical, as well as a better understanding of how moderate epistemological naturalism comports, at least in principle, with moderate rationalism. This paper defends moderate rationalism; but it does not defend everything rationalists have often wanted, only what it is reasonable to grant them.

A few comments may help set the record straight on the issues Braybrooke raises (or reraises). First, I concede that my treatment of the relation between resources and opportunity costs was inaccurate. Braybrooke is correct in saying that opportunity costs may rise while resources are also rising. By itself, however, this does not resolve the question of whether power is inversely related to opportunity cost. It may still be true that one's power goes down when opportunity cost rises, even if one's (total) resources are rising. Specifically, one's power vis-a-vis e may go down precisely because the opportunity cost of getting e rises, even though one's total resources (and perhaps one's overall power) are rising.

The concept of power has long played a significant role in political thought, and recent decades have witnessed many attempts to analyze power and provide criteria for its measurement. In spite of this impressive literature, however, our understanding of power remains inadequate. Specifically, no fully comprehensive conceptual framework exists within which questions about power can be formulated precisely and dealt with systematically. In the absence of such a framework it is difficult to investigate empirical questions, such as the extent to which a country is dominated by a 'power elite,' and it is hard to discuss normative issues, such as the relationship between power and freedom, or the relationship between equality of power and justice. In this paper I shall outline a theory of power the ultimate aim of which is to shed light on empirical and normative questions in the political domain.

This article blends psychological and social factors in the explanation of science, and defends the compatibility of a psychosocial picture with an epistemic picture. It examines three variants of the 'political' approach to interpersonal persuasion advocated by Latour and others. In each case an 'epistemic' or mixed account is more promising and empirically better supported. Psychological research on motivated reasoning shows the epistemic limits of interest-driven belief. Against social constructivism, the paper defends the viability of a truth-based standard, and reports how truth-possession can be promoted even when scientific work is motivated by political/professional considerations.

Recent studies of emotion mindreading reveal that for three emotions, fear, disgust, and anger, deficits in face-based recognition are paired with deficits in the production of the same emotion. What type of mindreading process would explain this pattern of paired deficits? The simulation approach and the theorizing approach are examined to determine their compatibility with the existing evidence. We conclude that the simulation approach offers the best explanation of the data. What computational steps might be used, however, in simulation-style emotion detection? Four alternative models are explored: a generate-and-test model, a reverse simulation model, a variant of the reverse simulation model that employs an “as if” loop, and an unmediated resonance model.

Epistemics as a whole would have a larger scope, encompassing secondary as well as primary individual epistemology and social epistemology in addition. There are a variety of terms of intellectual evaluation, many of interest to epistemology. The ones most commonly used in the discipline are ‘justified’ and ‘rational.’ Another central term of intellectual appraisal, which oddly has received only scant attention in the field, is ‘intelligent.’ Epistemology should be concerned with this range of intellectual assessments. Ethics distinguishes consequentialist and deontological types of theories, and epistemology can utilize the distinction. Which cognitive processes are available, and which are to be approved, are matters that can only be settled with the help of cognitive science. An important distinction drawn in Epistemology and Cognition is the distinction between processes and methods of belief formation. Processes are basic psychological operations, either innate parts of our cognitive architecture or merely the results of maturation as opposed to learning.

Social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge or information. There is little consensus, however, on what the term "knowledge" comprehends, what is the scope of the "social", or what the style or purpose of the study should be. According to some writers, social epistemology should retain the same general mission as classical epistemology, revamped in the recognition that classical epistemology was too individualistic. According to other writers, social epistemology should be a more radical departure from classical epistemology, a successor discipline that would replace epistemology as traditionally conceived. The classical approach could be realized in at least two forms. One would emphasize the traditional epistemic goal of acquiring true beliefs. It would study social practices in terms of their impact on the truth-values of agents’ beliefs. A second version of the classical approach would focus on the epistemic goal of having justified or rational beliefs. Applied to the social realm, it might concentrate, for example, on when a cognitive agent is justified or warranted in accepting the statements and opinions of others. Proponents of the anti-classical approach have little or no use for concepts like truth and justification. In addressing the social dimensions of knowledge, they understand "knowledge" as simply what is believed, or what beliefs are "institutionalized" in this or that community, culture, or context. They seek to identify the social forces and influences responsible for knowledge production so conceived. Social epistemology is theoretically significant because of the central role of society in the knowledge-forming process. It also has practical importance because of its possible role in the redesign of information-related social institutions.

The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of justified belief. What I have in mind is an explanatory theory, one that explains in a general way why certain beliefs are counted as justified and others as unjustified. Unlike some traditional approaches, I do not try to prescribe standards for justification that differ from, or improve upon, our ordinary standards. I merely try to explicate the ordinary standards, which are, I believe, quite different from those of many classical, e. g., ‘Cartesian’, accounts.

This book deserves kudos. It presents one of the more novel versions of reliabilism to appear in recent years. The style is fast-paced and energetic, with no sacrifice in philosophical precision. It applies original interpretations of perceptual science to central issues in traditional epistemology, and should thereby earn itself a prominent place in the naturalistic epistemology literature. Finally, the book is more comprehensive than its title suggests. It illuminates a great many issues of traditional epistemology beyond perception, providing an up-to-date and thorough-going basic epistemology.

The central mission of cognitive science is to reveal the real nature of the mind, however familiar or foreign that nature may be to naive preconceptions. The existence of naive conceptions is also important, however. Prescientific thought and language contain concepts of the mental, and these concepts deserve attention from cognitive science. Just as scientific psychology studies folk physics (McCloskey 1983, Hayes 1985), viz., the common understanding (or misunderstanding) of physical phenomena, so it must study folk psychology, the common understanding of mental states. This subfield of scientific psychology is what I mean by the phrase 'the psychology of folk psychology'.

A conception of social epistemology is articulated with links to studies of science and opinion in such disciplines as history, sociology, and political science. The conception is evaluative, though, rather than purely descriptive. Three types of evaluative approaches are examined but rejected: relativism, consensualism, and expertism. A fourth, truth-linked, approach to intellectual evaluation is then advocated: social procedures should be appraised by their propensity to foster true belief. Standards of evaluation in social epistemics would be much the same as those in individual epistemics, only the objects of evaluation would be interpersonal patterns of judgment and communication, and institutional practices that bear on opinion formation.

This is a collection of chapters by the leading proponent of process reliabilism, explaining its relation to rival and/or neighboring theories including evidentialism, other forms of reliabilism, and virtue epistemology. It addresses other prominent themes in contemporary epistemology, such as the internalism/externalism debate, the epistemological upshots of experimental challenges to intuitional methodology, the source of epistemic value, and social epistemology. The Introduction addresses late-breaking responses to ongoing exchanges with friends, rivals, and critics of reliabilism.

Epistemology has always been concerned with mental states, especially doxastic states such as belief, suspension of judgment, and the like. A significant part of epistemology is the attempt to evaluate, appraise, or criticize alternative procedures for the formation of belief and other doxastic attitudes. In addressing itself to doxastic states, epistemology has usually employed our everyday mental concepts and language. Occasionally it has tried to systematize or precise these mental categories, e.g., by introducing the notion of subjective probabilities. But this is a minor refinement in our intuitive notion of degrees of confidence. What epistemology has not done—at least 20th century analytic epistemology hasn’t done it—is to seek help from experimental psychology in choosing its doxastic categories. Analytic epistemology has generally assumed that doxastic descriptions generated by casual and introspective thought are adequate for its purposes.

What are the conceptually necessary and sufficient conditions for a person, or organism, to perceive a given object? More precisely, what is the nature of our ordinary thought about perception that gives rise to our willingness or unwillingness to say that S perceives O? Some form of causal theory of perception is now, I think, widely accepted. Such a theory maintains that it is part of our concept of perception that S perceives O only if O causes a percept, or perceptual state, of S. I accept this causal requirement, though with some qualification. The crucial problem for the theory of perception is what must be added to the causal requirement. Not all causes of a percept are said to be perceived. Smith looks at a tree illuminated by the sun, when the sun is not itself in view. His visual percept is caused by the tree, but not only the tree. The percept's causal ancestry includes the sun and the array of light two inches from Smith's eyes. Why do we say that he sees the tree, but not the sun or the array of light? What principles underlie this invidious choice among causes? Similarly, we think of a bat as perceiving objects in his path, but not as perceiving himself. Yet, since he emits the sonar signals these objects reflect, he is himself a cause of his percepts. Why don't we say he perceives himself?