Marina Sbisà has long advocated that we think of the illocutionary force of a speech act in terms of the act’s (predictable) systematic effects on the normative relationship between a speaker and her audience. Building on this idea, I argue that the hypothesis of distinctive speech act norms can be used to explain how participants in a conversation coordinate the normative expectations they have of one another in conversation. Such an explanation earns its keep by explaining how speakers render themselves (...) illocutionarily intelligible to their audiences—thereby enabling us to articulate the sense of mutuality that characterizes speech exchanges. One important upshot of my reflections is that we should reject both Austin’s thesis that the successful performance of an illocutionary act depends on audience uptake and Sbisà’s claim that Austin’s thesis is required if we are to make sense of the illocutionary dimension of speech in terms of an act’s systematic effects on participants’ normative expectations of one another. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice is a wide-ranging and important book on a much-neglected topic: the injustice involved in cases in which distrust arises out of prejudice. Fricker has some important things to say about this sort of injustice: its nature, how it arises, what sustains it, and the unhappy outcomes associated with it for the victim and the society in which it takes place. In the course of developing this account, Fricker also develops an account of the epistemology of testimony. (...) Focusing my attention on that account, my central claims are two. First, at least some of Fricker's arguments against existing (inferentialist and non-inferentialist) views in the epistemology of testimony are less than fully persuasive, and the (non-inferentialist) view she ends up endorsing is not all that different from the views she criticizes. Second, her reasons for harboring doubts regarding the role of a principle of default entitlement within a non-inferentialist account are not persuasive. Neither of these claims affects the overall argument Fricker is trying to run. Rather, they suggest that Fricker may have picked more fights than she needed to in the epistemology of testimony. If so, we have reason to detach Fricker's important work on epistemic injustice from some of the details of the story she tells regarding the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 676-692, June 2022.

Kant and Milton: fundamentals and foundations -- Kant's journey in the constellation of German Miltonism: toward the procedure of succession -- Kant's Miltonic transfer to exemplarity: the succession to Milton's "On his blindness" in the groundwork of the Metaphysics of morals -- Kantian tragic form and Kantian "storytelling" -- The Critique of practical reason and Samson agonistes -- Kant's Miltonic procedure of succession in a key moment of the Critique of judgment.

Sanford C. Goldberg presents a novel account of the speech act of assertion. He argues that this type of speech act is answerable to an epistemic, context-sensitive norm. On this basis he shows the philosophical importance of assertion for key debates in philosophy of language and mind, epistemology, and ethics.

_Dynamics of the Mixed Economy_ applies the insights of modern Austrian political economy to examine economic policy in mixed economies. It compares and contrasts standard approaches to the growth of the state with that of modern Austrian political economy; examines in detail the nature and operation of the interventionist process in the context of nationalization, regulation and the welfare state; analyzes conditions that produce instability under laissez-faire capitalism; argues that the interventionist process is a 'spontaneous order'; and offers several 'pattern (...) predictions' regarding the character and behaviour of really existing economies. (shrink)

Sanford Goldberg investigates the role that others play in our attempts to acquire knowledge of the world.

Scholars and practitioners addressing the global food crisis have rarely incorporated perspectives from the world's religious traditions. This lacuna appears in multiple dimensions: until recently, environmentalists have tended to ignore food and agriculture; food justice advocates have focused on food quantities, rather than its method of production; and few scholars of religion have considered agriculture. Faith-based perspectives typically emphasize the dignity and sanctity of creation and offer holistic frameworks that integrate equity, economic, and environmental concerns, often called the three legs (...) of sustainability. Faith-based perspectives can provide new paradigms through which to assess food, consumption, and production and the attendant social relations; assess our scientific, economic, and social approaches; and acknowledge the moral and religious dimensions of the world food crisis. (shrink)

Sandford C. Goldberg puts forward a theory of epistemic normativity that is grounded in the things we properly expect of one another as epistemic subjects. This theory has far-reaching implications not only for the theory of epistemic normativity, but also for the nature of epistemic assessment itself.

In this paper I argue, first, that the most influential (and perhaps only acceptable) account of the epistemology of self-knowledge, developed and defended at great length in Wright (1989b) and (1989c) (among other places), leaves unanswered a question about the psychology of self-knowledge; second, that without an answer to this question about the psychology of self-knowledge, the epistemic account cannot be considered acceptable; and third, that neither Wright's own answer, nor an interpretation-based answer (based on a proposal from Jacobsen (1997)), (...) will suffice as an acceptable answer to the psychological question. My general ambition is thus to establish that more work is needed if we are to have a full account of self-knowledge in both its epistemological and psychological aspects. I conclude by suggesting how my thesis bears on those who aim to provide an empirical account of the cognition involved in self-knowledge. (shrink)

Many people do not know or believe there is a God, and many experience a sense of divine absence. Are these (and other) “divine hiddenness” facts evidence against the existence of God? Using Bayesian tools, we investigate *evidential arguments from divine hiddenness*, and respond to two objections to such arguments. The first objection says that the problem of hiddenness is just a special case of the problem of evil, and so if one has responded to the problem of evil then (...) hiddenness has no additional bite. The second objection says that, while hiddenness may be evidence against generic theism, it is not evidence against more specific conceptions of God, and thus hiddenness poses no epistemic challenge to a theist who holds one of these more specific conceptions. Our investigation leaves open just how strong the evidence from hiddenness really is, but we aim to clear away some important reasons for thinking hiddenness is of no evidential significance at all. (shrink)

I revise J L Mackie's first account of casual direction by replacing his notion of "fixity" by a newly defined notion of "sufficing" that is designed to accommodate indeterminism. Keeping Mackie's distinction between casual order and casual direction, I then consider another revision that replaces "fixity" with "one-way conditionship". In response to the charge that all such accounts of casual priority beg the question by making an unjustified appeal to temporal priority, i maintain that one-way conditionship explains rather that assumes (...) objective temporal dependence as well as objective casual dependence. (shrink)

A study of cultural tradition. Sanford Budick reveals an operative concept of Western cultures: according to this concept, the art of freely receiving and handing on cultural tradition and the act of achieving moral and aesthetic freedom in sublime representation are the same phenomenon.

Sometimes you are unreliable at fulfilling your doxastic plans: for example, if you plan to be fully confident in all truths, probably you will end up being fully confident in some falsehoods by mistake. In some cases, there is information that plays the classical role of evidence—your beliefs are perfectly discriminating with respect to some possible facts about the world—and there is a standard expected‐accuracy‐based justification for planning to conditionalize on this evidence. This planning‐oriented justification extends to some cases where (...) you do not have transparent evidence, in the sense that your beliefs are not perfectly discriminating with respect to any non‐trivial facts. In other cases, accuracy considerations do not tell you to plan to conditionalize on any information at all, but rather to plan to follow a different updating rule. Even in the absence of evidence, accuracy considerations can guide your doxastic plan. (shrink)

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 another person has, or would have, legitimate expectations regarding S’s epistemic condition, the satisfaction of these expectations would require that (...) S knows that p, and 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 two main sources of legitimate expectations regarding another’s epistemic condition: participation in a legitimate social practice ; and moral and epistemic expectations more generally . In developing my position on this score, I will have an opportunity 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; to contrast practice-generated entitlements to expect with epistemic reasons to believe; to defend the idea that moral and epistemic standards themselves can be taken to reflect legitimate expectations we have of each other; to compare the “should have known” phenomenon with a widely-discussed phenomenon in the ethics literature—that of culpable ignorance; and finally to suggest the bearing of the “should have known” phenomenon to epistemology itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sanford Freedman CHARACTER IN A COHERENT FICTION: ON PUTTING KING LEAR BACK TOGETHER AGAIN Criticism has never been able to talk about fictionality very long without talking about an "inside" and an "outside," a fictional world's relation to a non-fictional world. And always there lies an immediate tension in this relation posed by the concept of coherence. That is, does a fictional world cohere because it corresponds to (...) meanings "outside" die text or does a fictional world cohere because its "inside" parts stand in meaningful relation to each other? Northrop Frye, in explicating his dieory of symbols, distinguishes between "inside" and "outside" critical directions: Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make.1 That Frye suggests that critics see in both directions at once separates him from most twentieth-century Shakespearean critics who exaggerate one direction at the expense of the other. In this essay I will examine criticism of King Lear, specifically criticism about the play's characters from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, as a way of assessing this distinction, focusing on two related problems: first, how the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' legacy of"inside"/"outside" talk affects twentieth-century critical debate, and second, how twentieth-century controversy polarizes "insides" and "outsides" without acknowledging the implications of doing so. If such an exaimination serves to undermine dominant twentieth-century concepts of coherence within Shakespearean criticism by pointing to unwritten rules-of-thumb, it does so, ultimately, to alter perspective on the supposed rites of passage from theories which give us cleair, alternative versions of a fictional world (traditional theories) to theories which seem to leave us floundering in a pluralist acceptance of all possible versions of a fictional world (deconstructive theories). 196 Sanford Freedman197 Eighteenth-century critics do not scrutinize King Lear from the point of view of character but rather through the mental images or ideas which the characters' words evoke. When Johnson faults Shakespeare's description of Dover Cliff in IV.vi, he argues diat the passage "does not impress die mind at once with the horrible idea of an immense height. The impression is divided; you pass on, by computation, from one stage of the tremendous space to another."2 Lifting Edgar's words out of die context of character, Johnson assumes the role of the purveyor of literature, akin to the role Pope assumed when he starred the "beauties" in his Shakespearean texts. What concernsJohnson is the "true" effect of looking down from a precipice, and he implies that the description should produce in different minds the same idea, an idea which is for him a singular idea, unmediated by composite ideas because the idea of looking down from a precipice necessitates that the immediacy of effect be synonymous with that of the idea. Edgar's purpose in leading his father to the cliffis overshadowed by the idea of looking down from a cliff, and we would do well to investigate an "outside" source, Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, rather than the Shakespearean text, as a means of discovering the purposefulness of Johnson's comment. Critical significance lies notjust inJohnson's airing ofneoclassical concern, but, more importantly, in his failure to find what he expects to be "there" in the play's "inside." Ideas, not characters, matter to the eighteenth-century's coherence, and the scope or comprehensiveness of that coherence has relatively local application; that is, editors range over several lines looking for relevant ideas but not between scenes or acts. In fact, one explanation of why they do not see a double plot is that their critical attention, like that of Swift's Lilliputians, lacks scope; dierefore, they fail to anticipate, to see patterns. Again, Johnson, for example, does not observe Gloucester's, Edgar's, and the fool's repetition of... (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)

We explore the view that Frege's puzzle is a source of straightforward counterexamples to Leibniz's law. Taking this seriously requires us to revise the classical logic of quantifiers and identity; we work out the options, in the context of higher-order logic. The logics we arrive at provide the resources for a straightforward semantics of attitude reports that is consistent with the Millian thesis that the meaning of a name is just the thing it stands for. We provide models to show (...) that some of these logics are non-degenerate. (shrink)