William J. Talbott

In his path-breaking recent book, Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman brings academic epistemology to bear on important real world issues in information technology, the media, science, law, politics, and education. Though the project that Goldman undertakes ramifies in many directions, the motivating idea is simple. Knowledge is important. Social institutions and practices can and should be evaluated on how well or how poorly they contribute to knowledge of propositions of interest. This is Goldman’s criterion of veritistic value, which, he acknowledges, is only one of the criteria for evaluating social practices. Taken as a whole, this book is one of the most effective explanations in the philosophical literature of why truth matters, both theoretically and in practice.

The author uses a series of examples to illustrate two versions of a new, nonprobabilist principle of epistemic rationality, the special and general versions of the metacognitive, expected relative frequency principle. These are used to explain the rationality of revisions to an agent’s degrees of confidence in propositions based on evidence of the reliability or unreliability of the cognitive processes responsible for them—especially reductions in confidence assignments to propositions antecedently regarded as certain—including certainty-reductions to instances of the law of excluded middle or the law of noncontradiction in logic or certainty-reductions to the certainties of probabilist epistemology. The author proposes special and general versions of the MERF principle and uses them to explain the examples, including the reasoning that would lead to thoroughgoing fallibilism—that is, to a state of being certain of nothing. The author responds to the main defenses of probabilism: Dutch Book arguments, Joyce’s potential accuracy defense, and the potential calibration defenses of Shimony and van Fraassen by showing that, even though they do not satisfy the probability axioms, degrees of belief that satisfy the MERF principle minimize expected inaccuracy in Joyce’s sense; they can be externally calibrated in Shimony and van Fraassen’s sense; and they can serve as a basis for rational betting, unlike probabilist degrees of belief, which, in many cases, human beings have no rational way of ascertaining. The author also uses the MERF principle to subsume the various epistemic akrasia principles in the literature. Finally, the author responds to Titelbaum’s argument that epistemic akrasia principles require that we be certain of some epistemological beliefs, if we are rational