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2170What is Justified Belief?In George Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge: New Studies in Epistemology, D. Reidel. pp. 1-25. 1979.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., ‘Cartesi…Read more
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1841A causal theory of knowingJournal of Philosophy 64 (12): 357-372. 1967.Since Edmund L. Gettier reminded us recently of a certain important inadequacy of the traditional analysis of "S knows that p," several attempts have been made to correct that analysis. In this paper I shall offer still another analysis (or a sketch of an analysis) of "S knows that p," one which will avert Gettier's problem. My concern will be with knowledge of empirical propositions only, since I think that the traditional analysis is adequate for knowledge of nonempirical truths.
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1531Discrimination 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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1191Experts: Which ones should you trust?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (1): 85-110. 2001.Mainstream epistemology is a highly theoretical and abstract enterprise. Traditional epistemologists rarely present their deliberations as critical to the practical problems of life, unless one supposes—as Hume, for example, did not—that skeptical worries should trouble us in our everyday affairs. But some issues in epistemology are both theoretically interesting and practically quite pressing. That holds of the problem to be discussed here: how laypersons should evaluate the testimony of expert…Read more
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1130Philosophical 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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1116Internalism exposedJournal of Philosophy 96 (6): 271-293. 1999.In recent decades, epistemology has witnessed the development and growth of externalist theories of knowledge and justification. Critics of externalism have focused a bright spotlight on this approach and judged it unsuitable for realizing the true and original goals of epistemology. Their own favored approach, internalism, is defended as a preferable approach to the traditional concept of epistemic justification. I shall turn the spotlight toward internalism and its most prominent rationale, re…Read more
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1052Toward a synthesis of reliabilism and evidentialism? Or: evidentialism's troubles, reliabilism's rescue packageIn Trent Dougherty (ed.), Evidentialism and its Discontents, Oxford University Press. pp. 254-280. 2011.For most of their respective existences, reliabilism and evidentialism (that is, process reliabilism and mentalist evidentialism) have been rivals. They are generally viewed as incompatible, even antithetical, theories of justification.1 But a few people are beginning to re-think this notion. Perhaps an ideal theory would be a hybrid of the two, combining the best elements of each theory. Juan Comesana (forthcoming) takes this point of view and constructs a position called “Evidentialist Reliabi…Read more
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723Internalism, Externalism, and the Architecture of JustificationJournal of Philosophy 106 (6): 309-338. 2009.
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656Knowledge 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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462Interpretation psychologizedMind and Language 4 (3): 161-85. 1989.The aim of this paper is to study interpretation, specifically, to work toward an account of interpretation that seems descriptively and explanatorily correct. No account of interpretation can be philosophically helpful, I submit, if it is incompatible with a correct account of what people actually do when they interpret others. My question, then, is: how does the (naive) interpreter arrive at his/her judgments about the mental attitudes of others? Philosophers who have addressed this question h…Read more
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458Epistemic Relativism and Reasonable DisagreementIn Richard Feldman & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement, Oxford University Press. pp. 187-215. 2010.I begin with some familiar conceptions of epistemic relativism. One kind of epistemic relativism is descriptive pluralism. This is the simple, non-normative thesis that many different communities, cultures, social networks, etc. endorse different epistemic systems (E-systems), i.e., different sets of norms, standards, or principles for forming beliefs and other doxastic states. Communities try to guide or regulate their members’ credence-forming habits in a variety of different, i.e., incompatib…Read more
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451ExpertiseTopoi 37 (1): 3-10. 2018.This paper offers a sizeable menu of approaches to what it means to be an expert. Is it a matter of reputation within a community, or a matter of what one knows independently of reputation? An initial proposal characterizes expertise in dispositional terms—an ability to help other people get answers to difficult questions or execute difficult tasks. What cognitive states, however, ground these abilities? Do the grounds consist in “veritistic” states or in terms of evidence or justifiedness? To w…Read more
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431Epistemology and cognitionHarvard University Press. 1986.Against the traditional view, Alvin Goldman argues that logic, probability theory, and linguistic analysis cannot by themselves delineate principles of rationality or justified belief. The mind's operations must be taken into account.
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422Epistemics: The regulative theory of cognitionJournal of Philosophy 75 (10): 509-523. 1978.I wish to advocate a reorientation of epistemology. Lest anyone maintain that the enterprise I urge is not epistemology at all (even part of epistemology), I call this enterprise by a slightly different name: epistemics. Despite this terminological concession, I believe that the inquiry I advocate is significantly continuous with traditional epistemology. Like much of past epistemology, it would seek to regulate or guide our intellectual activities. It would try to lay down principles or suggest…Read more
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416Reliabilism and the Value of KnowledgeIn Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic value, Oxford University Press. pp. 19-41. 2009.
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399ReliabilismStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.Reliabilism is a general approach to epistemology that emphasizes the truth conduciveness of a belief forming process, method, or other epistemologically relevant factor. The reliability theme appears both in theories of knowledge and theories of justification. ‘Reliabilism’ is sometimes used broadly to refer to any theory of knowledge or justification that emphasizes truth getting or truth indicating properties. These include theories originally proposed under different labels, such as ‘trackin…Read more
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384Why social epistemology is real epistemologyIn Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Social Epistemology, Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 1-29. 2010.
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374Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-readingTrends in Cognitive Sciences 2 (12): 493-501. 1998.A new class of visuomotor neuron has been recently discovered in the monkey’s premotor cortex: mirror neurons. These neurons respond both when a particular action is performed by the recorded monkey and when the same action, performed by another individual, is observed. Mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system matching observation and execution of goal-related motor actions. Experimental evidence suggests that a similar matching system also exists in humans. What might be the functional r…Read more
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372Is social cognition embodied?Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13 (4): 154-159. 2009.Theories of embodied cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear how to understand them. We offer several interpretations of embodiment, the most interesting being the thesis that mental representations in bodily formats (B-formats) have an important role in cognition. Potential B-formats include motoric, somatosensory, affective and interoceptive formats. The literature on mirroring and related phenomena provides support for a limited-scope version of embodied social cognition u…Read more
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369Mirroring, simulating and mindreadingMind and Language 24 (2): 235-252. 2009.Pierre Jacob (2008) raises several problems for the alleged link between mirroring and mindreading. This response argues that the best mirroring-mindreading thesis would claim that mirror processes cause, rather than constitute, selected acts of mindreading. Second, the best current evidence for mirror-based mindreading is not found in the motoric domain but in the domains of emotion and sensation, where the evidence (ignored by Jacob) is substantial. Finally, simulation theory should distinguis…Read more
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363Strong and weak justificationPhilosophical Perspectives 2 51-69. 1988.It is common in recent epistemology to distinguish different senses, or conceptions, of epistemic justification. The proposed oppositions include the objective/subjective, internalist/externalist, regulative/nonregulative, resource-relative/resource-independent, personal/verific, and deontological/evaluative conceptions of justification. In some of these cases, writers regard both members of the contrasting pair as legitimate; in other cases only one member. In this paper I want to propose anoth…Read more
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362Epistemic Folkways and Scientific EpistemologyPhilosophical Issues 3 271-285. 1993.What is the mission of epistemology, and what is its proper methodology? Such meta-epistemological questions have been prominent in recent years, especially with the emergence of various brands of "naturalistic" epistemology. In this paper, I shall reformulate and expand upon my own meta-epistemological conception (most fully articulated in Goldman, 1986), retaining many of its former ingredients while reconfiguring others. The discussion is by no means confined, though, to the meta-epistemologi…Read more
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358Why Citizens Should Vote: A Causal Responsibility ApproachSocial Philosophy and Policy 16 (2): 201-217. 1999.Why should a citizen vote? There are two ways to interpret this question: in a prudential sense, and in a moral sense. Under the first interpretation, the question asks why—or under what circumstances—it is in a citizen's self-interest to vote. Under the second interpretation, it asks what moral reasons citizens have for voting. I shall mainly try to answer the moral version of the question, but my answer may also, in some circumstances, bear on the prudential question. Before proceeding to my o…Read more
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352Reliabilist EpistemologyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.One of the main goals of epistemologists is to provide a substantive and explanatory account of the conditions under which a belief has some desirable epistemic status (typically, justification or knowledge). According to the reliabilist approach to epistemology, any adequate account will need to mention the reliability of the process responsible for the belief, or truth-conducive considerations more generally. Historically, one major motivation for reliabilism—and one source of its enduring int…Read more
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327Précis of Knowledge in a Social WorldPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (1): 185-190. 1999.Epistemology has historically focused on individual inquirers conducting their intellectual affairs in total isolation from one another. Methodological solipsism aside, however, it is incontestable that people’s opinions are massively influenced by their community and culture, by the written and spoken words of others, both past and present. This has led recent epistemologists to pay greater attention to the social dimensions of knowledge, especially to the role of testimony as a source of justi…Read more
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322Philosophical Theory and Intuitional EvidenceIn Michael Depaul & William Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, Rowman & Littlefield. 1998.How can intuitions be used to validate or invalidate a philosophical theory? An intuition about a case seems to be a basic evidential source for the truth of that intuition, i.e., for the truth of the claim that a particular example is or isn’t an instance of a philosophically interesting kind, concept, or predicate. A mental‐state type is a basic evidential source only if its tokens reliably indicate the truth of their contents. The best way to account for intuitions being a basic evidential so…Read more
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311The Internalist Conception of JustificationMidwest Studies in Philosophy 5 (1): 27-51. 1980.One possible aim of epistemology is to advise cognizers on the proper choice of beliefs or other doxastic attitudes. This aim has often been part of scientific methodology: to tell scientists when they should accept a given hypothesis, or give it a certain degree of credence. This regulative function is naturally linked to the notion of epistemic justification. It may well be suggested that a cognizer is justified in believing something just in case the rules of proper epistemic procedure prescr…Read more
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300Systems-oriented social epistemologyIn Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 189-214. 2005.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |