Sanford Goldberg

In a good deal of his work on epistemic justification and the regress problem, Peter Klein has argued that foundationalist replies cannot work, as they suffer from an in-principle inability to reply to the regress problem. In this chapter, I argue that his argument begs the question. To do so, I do not argue that foundationalism is true; only that there are versions which, on some arguable (but not uncontroversial) assumptions, would constitute an adequate response to the regress problem. The conclusion will be that if foundationalist replies are unacceptable, it is not because they can't respond to the problem, as Klein alleges. The significance of my argument lies in its meta-epistemological orientation: I will be arguing for the possibility that there is a kind of doxastic (epistemic) responsibility that is not a matter of having adequate reasons. If this claim is plausible, it opens up the prospects for a certain kind of (reliabilist and socially-oriented) foundationalism. The irony should not be lost on us: externalist accounts of justification are standardly thought to run afoul of considerations of epistemic responsibility, whereas I will be suggesting that they are a core part of our best hope to be able to make sense of epistemic responsibility.

In other work I have defended the claim that, when we rely on other speakers by accepting what they tell us, our reliance on them differs in epistemically relevant ways from our reliance on instruments, when we rely on them by accepting what they "tell" us. However, where I have explored the former sort of reliance at great length (Goldberg 2010), I have not done so with the latter. In this paper my aim is to do so. My key notions will be those of our social practices, the normative expectations that are sanctioned by those practices, and the epistemically engineered environments constituted by some of these practices. With these notions in mind, I will argue that one's reliance on instruments, while relevantly different (epistemically speaking) from one's reliance on other speakers, can nevertheless manifest a kind of epistemic dependence which epistemological theory can and should acknowledge.

According to anti-reductionism, audiences have a default (but defeasi-ble) epistemic entitlement to accept observed testimony. This paper explores the prospects of arguing from this premise to a conclusion in ethics, to the effect that speakers enjoy a default (but defeasible) moral entitlement to expect to be trusted when they testify. After proposing what I regard as the best attempt to link the two, I conclude that any argument from the one to the other will depend on a strong epistemological assumption that has not yet been discussed in this connection.

This paper develops a normative account of epistemic luck, according to which the luckiness of epistemic luck is analyzed in terms of the expectations a subject is entitled to have when she satisfies the standards of epistemic justification. This account enables us to distinguish three types of epistemic luck-bad, good, and sheer-and to model the roles they play e.g. in Gettierization. One controversial aspect of the proposed account is that it is non-reductive. While other approaches analyze epistemic luck in non-epistemic terms-either in modal terms (lack of safety) or in agential terms (lack of creditworthiness)-I argue that the non-reductive nature of the normative account is actually a selling-point relative to its competitors.

It has been alleged that the demands of friendship conflict with the norms of epistemology—in particular, that there are cases in which the moral demands of friendship would require one to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, and thereby come to believe something in violation of ordinary epistemic standards on justified or responsible belief (Baker in Hazlett in A luxury of the understanding: on the value of true belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). The burden of this paper is to explain these appearances away. I contend that the impression of epistemic partiality in friendship dissipates once we acknowledge the sorts of practical and epistemic reasons that are generated by our values: value-reflecting reasons. The present proposal has several virtues: it requires fewer substantial commitments than other proposals seeking to resist the case for epistemic partiality (in particular, it eschews both Pragmatic Encroachment and Epistemic Permissivism); it is independently motivated, as it cites a phenomenon—value-reflecting reasons—we have independent reasons to accept; it provides a single, unified account of how various features of friendship bear on belief-formation; and makes clear how it is the very value we place on friendship itself that ensures against epistemic partiality.

In this paper I present a particular program for Social Epistemology to pursue, and I try to motivate the importance of pursuing this program. According to this proposal, social epistemology is the systematic exploration of the epistemic significance of other minds. The following two questions are fundamental to this exploration: (1) what are the varieties of ways we rely on others in information-acquisition,-storage,-processing,-assessment, and-transmission?; and (2) with respect to each of these sorts of ways we rely on others, what is the epistemic significance of the fact that we do so rely? In addressing (2), we will also need to address a third question, regarding the appropriate norms for the assessment of acts of reliance, when we rely on others in one or more of these ways. Some of these norms will be norms of inquiry (broadly construed), and it is here where we will see the face of epistemic agency in social epistemology. I conclude by arguing that traditional epistemology (with what I will argue is its " normative " orientation) can and should be a core contributor to this sort of inquiry: it should provide a distinctly normative framework with which to supplement empirically-minded descriptive answers to (1), and in so doing it can suggest precisely where questions of epistemic agency bear on questions of epistemic assessment.

Internalist justification is standardly motivated by appeal to the New Evil Demon intuition. It is rarely asked whether honoring this intuition comes at a cost. In this paper I want to argue in the affirmative, that the demon-proofing of justification comes at a great cost. It will be agreed on all sides that if S's belief that p enjoys a " demon-proof " justification, the strength of S's epistemic position is no greater than the epistemically worst-off of S's doppelgangers. What I aim to bring out is the variety of ways the Demon can wreak havoc on what pre-theoretically we might have called the epistemic robustness of S's doppelgangers. In this way we can use the trope of the Demon to show how weak internalist justification actually is, when it is formulated so as to meet the constraint of the New Evil Demon intuition. While I cannot pretend that this point is particularly novel, I aim to bring it out in a distinctly metaepistemological fashion which, I hope, does bring some new light to a traditional topic.

In this paper I present a particular program for Social Epistemology to pursue, and I try to motivate the importance of pursuing this program. According to this proposal, social epistemology is the systematic exploration of the epistemic significance of other minds. The following two questions are fundamental to this exploration: (1) what are the varieties of ways we rely on others in information-acquisition,-storage,-processing,-assessment, and-transmission?; and (2) with respect to each of these sorts of ways we rely on others, what is the epistemic significance of the fact that we do so rely? In addressing (2), we will also need to address a third question, regarding the appropriate norms for the assessment of acts of reliance, when we rely on others in one or more of these ways. Some of these norms will be norms of inquiry (broadly construed), and it is here where we will see the face of epistemic agency in social epistemology. I conclude by arguing that traditional epistemology (with what I will argue is its " normative " orientation) can and should be a core contributor to this sort of inquiry: it should provide a distinctly normative framework with which to supplement empirically-minded descriptive answers to (1), and in so doing it can suggest precisely where questions of epistemic agency bear on questions of epistemic assessment.

It is natural to suppose that a reason of the form that so-and-so said that p can be (among) one’s reason(s) for believing that p.  Let us call reasons of this kind “testimonial reasons.”  There are at least two fundamental questions we can ask about the nature of testimonial reasons.  First, what is the nature and strength of these reasons?  This is a question at the heart of the epistemology of testimony literature.  Second, what is/are the mechanism(s) by which testimonial reasons are generated?  This is a question at the intersection of philosophy of language and epistemology, as the mechanisms in question might pertain to the speaker’s testimony, the hearer’s apprehension of that testimony, or some combination of the two.  In this chapter I propose to address both of these questions.

This paper reviews recent philosophical work on assertion, with a special focus on work exploring the theme of assertion’s norm.  It concludes with a brief section characterizing several open questions that might profitably be explored from this perspective.

Alessandra Tanesini’s insightful paper explores the moral and epistemic harms of arrogance, particularly in conversation.  Of special interest to her is the phenomenon of arrogance-induced silencing, whereby one speaker’s arrogance either prevents another from speaking altogether or else undermines her capacity to produce certain speech acts such as assertions (Langton 1993, 2009).  I am broadly sympathetic to many of Tanesini’s claims about the harms associated with this sort of silencing.  In this paper I propose to address what I see as a lacuna in her account.  I believe (and will argue) that the arrogant speaker can put those he silences in the morally outrageous position in which their own silence contributes to their oppression.  While nothing in Tanesini’s account would predict or explain this, the wrinkle I propose will aim to do so in a way that is in the spirit of her account.  To do so, I will need to expand the focus of discussion: instead of concentrating on (arrogance-induced) silencing, I will consider the phenomenon of (arrogance-induced) silence.  When one is silent in the face of a mutually observed assertion (whatever the cause of this silence), one’s silence will be interpreted by others.  I argue that (1) under certain widespread conditions, a hearer’s silence in the face of the arrogant speaker’s assertions is likely to be falsely interpreted as indicating her assent to the assertion; and (2) such an interpretation of the hearer’s silence will bring new harms in its wake – in particular, harms to the hearer who was silenced, and also harms to the community at large.  When we combine these new harms with the ones Tanesini identified in her paper, we reach the further conclusion that (3) the harms of silencing (whether arrogance-induced or otherwise) are potentially far worse than many have imagined.

In this paper, I am interested in knowing how evidence one should have had (on the one hand) and one’s higher-order evidence (on the other) interact in determinations of the justification of belief.  In doing so I aim to address two types of scenario that previous discussions have left open.  In one type of scenario, there is a clash between a subject’s higher-order evidence and the evidence she should have had: S’s higher-order evidence is misleading as to the existence or likely epistemic bearing of further evidence she should have.  In the other, while there is further evidence S should have had, this evidence would only have offered additional support for S’s belief that p.  The picture I offer derives from two “epistemic ceiling” principles linking evidence to justification: one’s justification for the belief that p can be no higher than it is on one’s total evidence, nor can it be higher than what it would have been had one had all of the evidence one should have had.  Together, these two principles entail what I call the doctrine of Epistemic Strict Liability: insofar as one fails to have evidence one should have had, one is epistemically answerable to that evidence whatever reasons one happened to have regarding the likely epistemic bearing of that evidence.  I suggest that such a position can account for the battery of intuitions elicited in the full range of cases I will be considering.

In this paper I argue that there are cases in which a speaker S’s observation of the fact that her assertion that p is accepted by another person enhances the strength of S’s own epistemic position with respect to p, as compared to S’s strength of epistemic position with respect to p prior to having made the assertion.  I conclude by noting that the sorts of consideration that underwrite this (happy) possibility may go some distance towards explaining several (unhappy) aspects of our group life as epistemic subjects – in particular, groupthink and group polarization.

This paper addresses how the anonymity of an assertion affects the epistemological dimension of their production by speakers, and their reception by hearers.  After arguing that anonymity does have implications in both respects, I go on to argue that at least some of these implications derive from a warranted diminishment in speakers’ and hearers’ expectations of one another when there are few mechanisms for enforcing the responsibilities attendant to speech.  As a result, I argue, anonymous assertions do not carry the same “promise” of the speaker’s relevant epistemic authoritativeness that ordinary assertions do.  If this is correct, the phenomenon of anonymity provides us with a lesson regarding ordinary assertions: their aptness for engendering belief in others, and so for communicating knowledge, depends in general on the very publicness of the act of assertion itself.

The aim of this paper is to defend a novel characterization of epistemic luck.  Helping myself to the notions of epistemic entitlement and adequate explanation, I propose that a true belief suffers from epistemic luck iff an adequate explanation of the fact that the belief acquired is true must appeal to propositions to which the subject herself is not epistemically entitled (in a sense to be made clear below).  The burden of the argument is to show that there is a plausible construal of the notions of epistemic entitlement and adequate explanation on which the resulting characterization of epistemic luck, though admittedly programmatic, has several important virtues.  It avoids difficulties which plague modal accounts of epistemic luck; it can explain the conflicting temptations one can feel in certain alleged cases of epistemic luck; it offers a novel account of the value of knowledge, without committing itself to any particular analysis of knowledge; and it illuminates the significance for epistemology of the phenomenon of epistemic luck itself.

In this paper I will be arguing that there are cases in which a subject, S, should have known that p, even though, given her state of evidence at the time, she was in no position to know it. My argument for this result will involve making two claims.
The uncontroversial claim is this: S should have known that p when (one) another person has, or would have, legitimate expectations regarding S’s epistemic condition, (two) the satisfaction of these expectations would require that S knows that p, and (three) S fails to know that p. The controversial claim is that these three conditions are sometimes jointly satisfied. I will spend the majority of my time defending the
controversial claim. I will argue that there are (at least) two main sources of legitimate expectations regarding another’s epistemic condition: participation in a legitimate social practice (where one’s role entitles others to expect things of one); and moral and epistemic expectations more generally (the institutions of morality and epistemic assessment being such as to entitle us to expect various things of one another). In
developing my position on this score, I will have an opportunity (i) to defend the doctrine that there are “practice-generated entitlements” to expect certain things,where it can happen that the satisfaction of these expectations requires another’s having
certain pieces of knowledge; (ii) to contrast practice-generated entitlements to expect with epistemic reasons to believe; (iii) to defend the idea that moral and epistemic standards themselves can be taken to reflect legitimate expectations we have of each other; (iv) to compare the “should have known” phenomenon with a widely-discussed phenomenon in the ethics literature—that of culpable ignorance; and finally (v) to
suggest the bearing of the “should have known” phenomenon to epistemology itself (in particular, the theory of epistemic justification).

The present paper proposes a new philosophical problem: the Problem of the Many Minds. (As will become clear in due time, this problem is distinct from the Problem of the Many.) Our problem concerns the number of minds which exist per ordinary functioning brain. It is ...

Introduction Semantic anti-individualism (AI) is the thesis that at least some propositional attitudes depend for their individuation on factors that do not supervene on the internal states of the subject. This is a thesis in semantics, since attitudes are individuated in part by their ...

In this paper I argue that there is a presumptive (albeit defeasible) entitlement for participants in a conversation to assume that a hearer’s silence in the face of an observed assertion indicates acceptance.  I argue for this on the basis of considerations pertaining to our actual practices with assertion, together with considerations pertaining to the normative dimensions of that practice (deriving from Stalnaker’s account of the “essential effect” of assertion).  One result of my thesis is that in contexts in which a hearer is known or observed to have observed an assertion, she is under prima facie normative pressure, if she rejects the assertion, to signal having done so.  After defending these claims, I address the variety of contexts in which the entitlement itself is defeated (including but not limited to conditions of “silencing”).