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Alvin Ira Goldman (born 1938) is an American philosopher who is Emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at
Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and wa ...
in
New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state in the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York (state), New York; on the ea ...
and a leading figure in
epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...
.


Education and career

Goldman earned his BA from
Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manha ...
and PhD from
Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...
and previously taught at the
University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
(1963–1980), the University of Illinois, Chicago (1980–1983) and the
University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. ...
(1983–1994). He joined the Rutgers faculty in 1994 and retired in 2018. He is married to the ethicist Holly Martin Smith.


Philosophical work

Goldman has done influential work on a wide range of philosophical topics, but his principal areas of research are
epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...
,
philosophy of mind Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are ad ...
, and cognitive science.


Action theory

Goldman's early book, ''A Theory of Human Action'' (a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis), presents a systematic way of classifying and relating the many actions we perform at any time. Its influence was broad and can be found in, among other writings, John Rawls's book '' A Theory of Justice''. Goldman's early work in action theory soon gave way to work in other branches of philosophy, most influentially epistemology.


Epistemology

Goldman's accounts of knowledge and justified belief, using notions like causation and reliability instead of normative concepts like permissibility and obligation, contributed to a philosophical approach that came to be known in the 1970s as naturalized epistemology. (Unlike W.V.O. Quine's version of naturalized epistemology, however, Goldman's retains a traditional focus on questions of justification.) Goldman's view emerged initially as part of the efforts in the 1960s to find a "fourth" condition in response to the Gettier challenge to the account of knowledge as "justified true belief." In his 1967 paper, " A Causal Theory of Knowing", Goldman proposed that knowledge amounts to true belief appropriately caused by the fact that makes it true. Later, he claimed knowledge amounts to true belief that is produced by a reliable process. Goldman has described his "naturalistic" approach to epistemology as splitting "epistemology (individual epistemology, anyway) into two parts.... The first part is dedicated to the 'analytic' task of identifying the criteria, or satisfaction conditions, for various normative epistemic statuses. With respect to the normative status of justifiedness (of belief), the proposed criterion is the reliability of the belief-forming processes by which the belief is produced. Defense of this criterion of justifiedness was not based on scientific psychology, but rather a familiar form of armchair methodology. The second part is the task where science enters the picture. Psychological science is required to identify the kinds of operations or computations available to the human cognizer, how well they work when operating on certain inputs and under certain conditions." More recently, Goldman has focused his epistemological efforts on questions of social epistemology, of the different social mechanisms through which knowledge is transmitted in society. His work in social epistemology has dealt with the law (especially evidence), voting and media, among other topics. He attempts to provide (in his words) a less radical view of social epistemology than those suggested by cultural theorists and postmodernists under that name. His approach uses tools of
analytic philosophy Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United ...
especially formal epistemology to analyze problems in social knowledge. Some of this work is summarized in his book ''Knowledge in a Social World''.


Other work

Goldman has devoted significant time to showing how research in cognitive science is relevant to a variety of branches of philosophy including epistemology. Much of this work appears in his books ''Epistemology and Cognition'', ''Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science'', and ''Simulating Minds''.


Bibliography

* ''Action'' (1965) * " A Causal Theory of Knowing" in '' The Journal of Philosophy'' v. 64 (1967), pp. 357–372. * ''A Theory of Human Action'' (1970) * "Epistemics: The Regulative Theory of Cognition," ''The Journal of Philosophy'' 75 (1978) pp. 509–523. * "What is Justified Belief?" in ''Justification and Knowledge'' (1979), pp. 1–23. * ''Epistemology and Cognition'' (1986) * ''Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences'' (1991) * ''Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science'' (1993) * ''Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science'' (editor), (1993) * ''Knowledge in a Social World'' (1999) * ''Pathways to Knowledge: Private and Public'' (2004) * ''Simulating Minds'' (2006) * ''Joint Ventures: Mindreading, Mirroring, and Embodied Cognition'' (2013)


See also

* American philosophy * List of American philosophers * Reliabilism


References


External links


Alvin Goldman's home page



Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on reliabilism, written by Goldman

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on naturalised epistemology, relevant to Goldman
{{DEFAULTSORT:Goldman, Alvin 20th-century American philosophers 21st-century American philosophers Living people 1938 births Princeton University alumni Philosophers from Michigan Philosophers from Arizona Philosophers from Texas Epistemologists University of Michigan faculty University of Arizona faculty Rutgers University faculty Action theorists Philosophers of mind