Sanford C Goldberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 489015 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sanford C Goldberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sanford C |
| FAMILY NAME | Goldberg |
| SIGNATURE | GOLDBERG S C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9496-6356 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 74 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1955 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
On the doxastic constraint on group evidence
A theory of group evidence is an account of the conditions under which a piece of evidence counts as being possessed by a group. In her book GROUPS AS MORAL AND EPISTEMIC AGENTS (Oxford, 2024), Jessica Brown has argued that any adequate account must impose a doxastic constraint on group evidence. She has used this constraint, together with other arguments in her book, to defend a non-summative account of group evidence on which a group does not h…
Do scientific communities understand? A fictionalist account
Testimonial Reliance
Unpossessed evidence revisited: Our options are limited
Several influential thought experiments from Harman 1973 purport to show that unpossessed evidence can undermine knowledge. Recently, some epistemologists have appealed to these thought experiments in defense of a logically stronger thesis: unpossessed evidence can defeat justification. But these appeals fail to appreciate that Harman himself thought of his examples as Gettier cases, and so would have rejected this strengthening of his thesis. On…
Epistemic negligence: Between performance and evidence
Brown on infallibilism’s problem with testimony
Coherence in Science: A Social Approach
What is a speaker owed
Suppose someone tells you something. Under what conditions do you owe it to her to accept what she's said? I will call this The Question. The Question raises an issue of philosophical significance. For one thing, the issue appears to be at the heart of #BelieveWomen, that part of the #MeToo movement focusing on the proper way to respond to allegations of sexual harassment. Do we owe it to women who tell us that they have been assaulted to believe…
The Promise and Pitfalls of Online ‘Conversations’
Good conversations are one of the great joys of life. Online (social media) ‘conversations’ rarely seem to make the grade. In this paper I use some tools from philosophy in an attempt to illuminate what might be going wrong
Can the Demands of Justice Always Be Reconciled with the Demands of Epistemology? Testimonial Injustice and the Prospects of a Normative Clash
In this paper I argue that there are possible cases in which the demands of justice and the norms of epistemology cannot be simultaneously satisfied. I will bring out these normative clashes in terms of the now-familiar phenomenon of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007). While the resulting argument is very much in the spirit of two other sorts of argument that have received sustained attention recently – arguments alleging epistemic partiality i…
Normative Expectations in Epistemology
There are all sorts of normative expectations in epistemology—expectations about the epistemic condition of other subjects—that would appear to be relevant to epistemic assessment in ways that do not conform to epistemic standards as traditionally understood. The expectations in question include expectations of inquiries pursued or completed, expectations of certain competences, professional expectations, expectations of having consulted with exp…
What epistemologists of testimony should learn from philosophers of science
On the epistemic significance of practical reasons to inquire
Telling and the reasons of testimony
What we owe each other, epistemologically speaking: Ethico-political values in social epistemology
Epistemically engineered environments
Should have known
The Costs of Demon-Proof Justification
Internalist justification is standardly motivated by appeal to the New Evil Demon intuition. In this chapter it is argued that the Demon-proofing of justification comes at a great cost. Assuming that if S’s belief that p enjoys a ‘Demon-proof’ justification, then the strength of S’s epistemic position is no greater than the epistemically worst-off of S’s doppelgangers, the burden of the argument is to show that the Demon can wreak havoc on the ep…
Externalism, Self-Knowledge, and Skepticism: New Essays
Written by an international team of leading scholars, this collection of thirteen new essays explores the implications of semantic externalism for self-knowledge and skepticism, bringing recent developments in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and epistemology to bear on the issue. Structured in three parts, the collection looks at self-knowledge, content transparency, and then meta-semantics and the nature of mental content. Th…
Assertion: On the Philosophical Significance of Assertoric Speech
Searle vs. Searle on language, speech, and thought
Searle’s (1963/1991) account of the communicative intentions in speech acts purports to be an advance over that of Grice (1957), in acknowledging the ineliminable role of the linguistic (usage) rules in enabling the hearer to recognize the speaker’s communicative intentions. In this paper we argue that, given some plausible assumptions about ordinary speech exchanges, Searle’s insight on this score is incompatible with his (1983) commitment to in…
Epistemic Entitlement and Luck
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 sh…
Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief, in the Classroom and Beyond: Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief
Inclusiveness in the face of anticipated disagreement
Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology
Should have known
Monitoring and Anti-Reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony
One of the central points of contention in the epistemology of testimony concerns the uniqueness (or not) of the justification of beliefs formed through testimony–whether such justification can be accounted for in terms of, or 'reduced to', other familiar sort of justification, e.g. without relying on any epistemic principles unique to testimony. One influential argument for the reductionist position, found in the work of Elizabeth Fricker, argue…
Testimonial Knowledge in Early Childhood, Revisited 1
Many epistemologists agree that even very young children sometimes acquire knowledge through testimony. In this paper I address two challenges facing this view. The first (building on a point made in Lackey (2005) ) is the defeater challenge , which is to square the hypothesis that very young children acquire testimonial knowledge with the fact that children (whose cognitive immaturity prevents them from having or appreciating reasons) cannot be …
Epistemic Entitlement and Luck
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 sh…
Testimonially based Knowledge from False Testimony
I provide an example to illustrate the contention that there are cases in which a recipient can acquire testimonially based knowledge from false testimony. The example involves a case in which the proposition believed by the recipient, though derived in a testimonially based way, is not identical with the proposition attested to. I conclude by suggesting that if we are to make sense of such cases as cases of testimonially based knowledge, we need…
What is a speaker owed
Suppose someone tells you something. Under what conditions do you owe it to her to accept what she's said? I will call this The Question. The Question raises an issue of philosophical significance. For one thing, the issue appears to be at the heart of #BelieveWomen, that part of the #MeToo movement focusing on the proper way to respond to allegations of sexual harassment. Do we owe it to women who tell us that they have been assaulted to believe…
Epistemically engineered environments
Influence and leadership as a function of group structure
Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief, in the Classroom and Beyond: Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief
Anti‐Individualism and Knowledge
What epistemologists of testimony should learn from philosophers of science
On the epistemic significance of practical reasons to inquire
Radical Interpretation, Understanding, and the Testimonial Transmission of Knowledge
Telling and the reasons of testimony
What we owe each other, epistemologically speaking: Ethico-political values in social epistemology
How lucky can you get
Influence and leadership as a function of group structure
The Psychology and Epistemology of Self-Knowledge
Testimonially based Knowledge from False Testimony
I provide an example to illustrate the contention that there are cases in which a recipient can acquire testimonially based knowledge from false testimony. The example involves a case in which the proposition believed by the recipient, though derived in a testimonially based way, is not identical with the proposition attested to. I conclude by suggesting that if we are to make sense of such cases as cases of testimonially based knowledge, we need…
Reported Speech and the Epistemology of Testimony
Radical Interpretation, Understanding, and the Testimonial Transmission of Knowledge
Monitoring and Anti-Reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony
One of the central points of contention in the epistemology of testimony concerns the uniqueness (or not) of the justification of beliefs formed through testimony–whether such justification can be accounted for in terms of, or 'reduced to', other familiar sort of justification, e.g. without relying on any epistemic principles unique to testimony. One influential argument for the reductionist position, found in the work of Elizabeth Fricker, argue…
Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology
To what extent are meaning, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, determined by aspects of the ‘outside world’? Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology presents twelve specially written essays exploring these debates in metaphysics and epistemology and the connections between them. In so doing, it examines how issues connected with the nature of mind and language bear on issues about the nature of knowledge and justifica…
How lucky can you get
Anti‐Individualism and Knowledge
Testimonial Knowledge in Early Childhood, Revisited 1
Many epistemologists agree that even very young children sometimes acquire knowledge through testimony. In this paper I address two challenges facing this view. The first (building on a point made in Lackey (2005) ) is the defeater challenge , which is to square the hypothesis that very young children acquire testimonial knowledge with the fact that children (whose cognitive immaturity prevents them from having or appreciating reasons) cannot be …
Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology
Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief, in the Classroom and Beyond: Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief
Inclusiveness in the face of anticipated disagreement
Searle vs. Searle on language, speech, and thought
Searle’s (1963/1991) account of the communicative intentions in speech acts purports to be an advance over that of Grice (1957), in acknowledging the ineliminable role of the linguistic (usage) rules in enabling the hearer to recognize the speaker’s communicative intentions. In this paper we argue that, given some plausible assumptions about ordinary speech exchanges, Searle’s insight on this score is incompatible with his (1983) commitment to in…
Epistemic Entitlement and Luck
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 sh…
Externalism, Self-Knowledge, and Skepticism: New Essays
Written by an international team of leading scholars, this collection of thirteen new essays explores the implications of semantic externalism for self-knowledge and skepticism, bringing recent developments in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and epistemology to bear on the issue. Structured in three parts, the collection looks at self-knowledge, content transparency, and then meta-semantics and the nature of mental content. Th…
Assertion: On the Philosophical Significance of Assertoric Speech
The Costs of Demon-Proof Justification
Internalist justification is standardly motivated by appeal to the New Evil Demon intuition. In this chapter it is argued that the Demon-proofing of justification comes at a great cost. Assuming that if S’s belief that p enjoys a ‘Demon-proof’ justification, then the strength of S’s epistemic position is no greater than the epistemically worst-off of S’s doppelgangers, the burden of the argument is to show that the Demon can wreak havoc on the ep…
Should have known
What we owe each other, epistemologically speaking: Ethico-political values in social epistemology
Epistemically engineered environments
The Promise and Pitfalls of Online ‘Conversations’
Good conversations are one of the great joys of life. Online (social media) ‘conversations’ rarely seem to make the grade. In this paper I use some tools from philosophy in an attempt to illuminate what might be going wrong
Can the Demands of Justice Always Be Reconciled with the Demands of Epistemology? Testimonial Injustice and the Prospects of a Normative Clash
In this paper I argue that there are possible cases in which the demands of justice and the norms of epistemology cannot be simultaneously satisfied. I will bring out these normative clashes in terms of the now-familiar phenomenon of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007). While the resulting argument is very much in the spirit of two other sorts of argument that have received sustained attention recently – arguments alleging epistemic partiality i…
Normative Expectations in Epistemology
There are all sorts of normative expectations in epistemology—expectations about the epistemic condition of other subjects—that would appear to be relevant to epistemic assessment in ways that do not conform to epistemic standards as traditionally understood. The expectations in question include expectations of inquiries pursued or completed, expectations of certain competences, professional expectations, expectations of having consulted with exp…
What epistemologists of testimony should learn from philosophers of science
Philosophy (32 works) · Epistemology (31 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (30 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Metaphysics (17 works) · Philosophy of language (16 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Political science (13 works) · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies (11 works) · Philosophy of science (11 works)