Alvin Goldman

(? - 2024)

Putative evidence or arguments for God’s existence have been debated for millennia. In recent years some practitioners of cognitive science have applied evidence garnered from their research to support their favored view in the theism/atheism debate. The first part of this chapter examines and rejects several attempts to use cognitive scientific findings in support of theism, including a perception-based approach offered by Baker and Zimmerman (chap. 5, this volume). The present chapter then proceeds in the opposite direction, by illustrating how cognitive scientific evidence can be used in conjunction with Bayesian reasoning to lead a rational and open-minded metaphysician to lower his or her prior credence in God’s existence, even by a substantial amount.

This chapter argues that empirical findings in cognitive science can play a significant evidential role in an optimal methodology for metaphysics. It does not propose any radical metaphysical methodology or any wholesale replacement of traditional methods. Rather, it offers a supplement to traditional methods. The chapter proposes a general template (or two) for metaphysical methodology under which cognitive scientific considerations might become routine or commonplace factors in realist metaphysics, not just isolated or occasional factors. This template is applied to four problems in metaphysics: the passage of time, moral value, natural kinds, and theism.

This chapter focuses on the justificational status of collective beliefs. When the Bush Administration believed (assuming its belief was genuine) that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, was it justified in so believing? It raises and explores problems about the relations between the justificational status of a group’s beliefs and those of its members. To what extent (if any) is this analogous to the relations within an individual between the justificational statuses of its own beliefs? Specifically, does “transmission” occur between the J-status of a group belief and the J-statuses of its members’ beliefs? The second half of the chapter advances a specific theory of justifiedness for collective belief, one borrowed and adapted from individual epistemology. This is the theory of process reliabilism. The chapter defends the thesis that the principal elements of process reliabilism, including its causal and historical features, apply (with suitable modifications) to the case of collective belief.

This article proposes a distinction between two kinds of empathy, or routes to empathy: mirroring empathy and reconstructive empathy. The focus is on a minimal sense of empathy, i.e., interpersonal mental isomorphism. Research on mirror systems indicates that isomorphisms are produced, largely automatically, across several domains: motor planning, touch, pain, and disgust. A second route to empathy is less automatic, and appears to be subserved by a core brain network dedicated to shifting perspective from the immediate environment to an alternative situation. Carroll and Buckner (2007) hypothesize the use of this network to implement four forms of self‐projection: remembering the past, thinking about the future (prospection), representing the viewpoint of others (mindreading), and navigation. The third kind of self‐projection is empathy (of the second variety). A possible common signature of this system is the presence of analogous egocentric biases in high‐level mindreading and episodic memory. The article concludes with some speculation about which form of empathy is “superior”.

Goldman sets forth a penetrating critique of internalism: the view that what makes beliefs justified or unjustified must be internal to the subject, where internality is typically defined in terms of a suitably strong accessibility relation. First, Goldman argues that internalism – as derived from what Goldman calls the “guidance‐deontological” conception of justification – presents its defenders with a dilemma: the needed accessibility will either be too weak to identify reliabilism as an externalist theory, or so strong that it will be difficult to derive it from the guidance‐deontology. Second, Goldman argues that internalism breeds skepticism, as can be seen when we consider its implications with regard to forgotten evidence, probabilistic relations, epistemic principles, and the availability of methods. In the last section, Goldman questions the _a priori_ methodology that is associated with internalism.

Gettier’s 1963 paper was enormously influential. Virtually all epistemologists agreed with Gettier that the JTB analaysis was mistaken. But this conclusion evidently depended on the reliability of the shared intuitions of Gettier’s and his philosophical contemporaries about the epistemological examples described in his chapter. How reliable are such intuitions? Today many philosophers challenge the reliability of classification intuitions. How are such challenges to be addressed, and what can we learn about the comparative reliability of putative experts (e.g. philosophers) and laypersons? Here it is proposed that philosophers can study this with the help of psychological techniques—including not only interview techniques of the kind utilized by experimental philosophers but other experimental techniques as well. Ways to investigate intuition’s reliability are illustrated.

Social epistemology is the normative theory of socioepistemic practices. Teaching is a socioepistemic practice, so educational practices belong on the agenda of social epistemology. A current question is whether intelligent design should be taught in biology classes. This paper focuses on the argument from “fairness” or “equal time.” The principal aim of education is knowledge transmission, but evidence renders it doubtful that giving intelligent design equal time would promote knowledge transmission. In making curricular decisions, boards of education should consult the experts. Are novices capable of identifying genuine experts? This social epistemological question is answered affirmatively.