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 knowledge-enhancing practices. The result is a bold, (...) timely, and systematic treatment of the philosophical foundations of an information society. (shrink)

Sanford C. Goldberg argues that a proper account of the communication of knowledge through speech has anti-individualistic implications for both epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language. In Part I he offers a novel argument for anti-individualism about mind and language, the view that the contents of one's thoughts and the meanings of one's words depend for their individuation on one's social and natural environment. In Part II he discusses the epistemic dimension of knowledge communication, arguing that the epistemic (...) characteristics of communication-based beliefs depend on features of the cognitive and linguistic acts of the subject's social peers. In acknowledging an ineliminable social dimension to mind, language, and the epistemic categories of knowledge, justification, and rationality, his book develops fundamental links between externalism in the philosophy of mind and language, on the one hand, and externalism is epistemology, on the other. (shrink)

I examine the epistemic import of collaborative research in science. I develop and defend a functional explanation for its growing importance. Collaborative research is becoming more popular in the natural sciences, and to a lesser degree in the social sciences, because contemporary research in these fields frequently requires access to abundant resources, for which there is great competition. Scientists involved in collaborative research have been very successful in accessing these resources, which has in turn enabled them to realize the epistemic (...) goals of science more effectively than other scientists, thus creating a research environment in which collaboration is now the norm. (shrink)

Most traditional epistemologists see trust and knowledge as deeply antithetical: we cannot know by trusting in the opinions of others; knowledge must be based on evidence, not mere trust. I argue that this is badly mistaken. Modern knowers cannot be independent and self-reliant. In most disciplines, those who do not trust cannot know. Trust is thus often more epistemically basic than empirical evidence or logical argument, for the evidence and the argument are available only through trust. Finally, since the reliability (...) of testimonial evidence depends on the trustworthiness of the testifier, this implies that knowledge often rests on a foundation of ethics. The rationality of many of our beliefs depends not only on our own character, but on the character of others. (shrink)

find myself believing all sorts 0f things for which I d0 not possess evidence: that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, that my car keeps stalling because the carburetor needs LO be rebuilt, that mass media threaten democracy, that slums cause emotional disorders, that my irregular heart beat is premature ventricular contraction, that students} grades are not correlated with success in the ncmacadcmic world, that nuclear power plants are not safe (enough) . . . The list 0f things I believe, though (...) I have no evidence for the truth of them, is, if not infinite, virtually endless. And.. (shrink)

Over the last decades, science has grown increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary and has come to depart in important ways from the classical analyses of the development of science that were developed by historically inclined philosophers of science half a century ago. In this paper, I shall provide a new account of the structure and development of contemporary science based on analyses of, first, cognitive resources and their relations to domains, and second of the distribution of cognitive resources among collaborators and (...) the epistemic dependence that this distribution implies. On this background I shall describe different ideal types of research activities and analyze how they differ. Finally, analyzing values that drive science towards different kinds of research activities, I shall sketch the main mechanisms underlying the perceived tension between disciplines and interdisciplinarity and argue for a redefinition of accountability and quality control for interdisciplinary and collaborative science. (shrink)

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 justification. The aim of Knowledge in a Social World (...) is to articulate a more systematic and wide-ranging conception of social epistemology, a conception that forges links with both empirical and policy-oriented disciplines that study the place of knowledge in society. On the one hand, it steers social epistemology along paths continuous with mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science; on the other, it carries epistemology into greater contact than is customary with political philosophy, legal philosophy, and such new or peripheral fields as Internet epistemology and philosophy of education. Although it never abandons the theoretical mission of epistemology, it also makes concerted forays into what may be called “applied epistemology”. (shrink)

Modern scientific knowledge is increasingly collaborative. Much analysis in social epistemology models scientists as self-interested agents motivated by external inducements and sanctions. However, less research exists on the epistemic import of scientists’ moral concern for their colleagues. I argue that scientists’ trust in their colleagues’ moral motivations is a key component of the rationality of collaboration. On the prevailing account, trust is a matter of mere reliance on the self-interest of one’s colleagues. That is, scientists merely rely on external compulsion (...) to motivate self-interested colleagues to be trustworthy collaborators. I show that this self-interest account has significant limitations. First, it cannot fully account for trust by relatively powerless scientists. Second, reliance on self-interest can be self-defeating. For each limitation, I show that moral trust can bridge the gap—when members of the scientific community cannot rely on the self-interest of their colleagues, they rationally place trust in the moral motivations of their colleagues. Case studies of mid-twentieth-century industrial laboratories and exploitation of junior scientists show that such moral trust justifies collaboration when mere reliance on the self-interest of colleagues would be irrational. Thus, this paper provides a more complete and realistic account of the rationality of scientific collaboration. (shrink)