Sanford C. Goldberg

The relevance of discriminatory knowledge of content

Those interested in securing the compatibility of anti-individualism and introspective knowledge of content (henceforth ‘compatibilists’) typically make a distinction between knowledge of content proper (KC) and discriminatory knowledge of content (DKC). Following Falvey and Owens (1994), most compatibilists allow that anti-individualism is not compatible with introspective DKC, but maintain that nonetheless anti-individualism is compatible with introspective KC. Though I have raised doubts about the compatibility of anti-individualism and introspective KC elsewhere (Goldberg, 1997 and forthcoming), here my aim is to suggest the philosophical relevance of DKC itself. My thesis is that there are cases in which a thinker’s failing to have DKC will affect the justification which she takes herself to have in drawing various inferences in the course of her reasoning, and so will affect that reasoning itself. After presenting illustrative examples and suggesting why anti-individualists themselves ought to acknowledge this point, I suggest that the examples indicate further work for anti-individualists: formulating what it takes to have DKC, and substantiating the view (widely held by anti-individualists) that anti-individualism’s implication that we (often) lack such knowledge is not to be taken as an important weakness of anti-individualism itself.

How lucky can you get

In this paper, I apply Duncan Pritchard’s anti-luck epistemology to the case of knowledge through testimony. I claim (1) that Pritchard’s distinction between veritic and reflective luck provides a nice taxonomy of testimony cases, (2) that the taxonomic categories that emerge can be used to suggest precisely what epistemic statuses are transmissible through testimony, and (3) that the resulting picture can make clear how testimony can actually be knowledge-generating.

Externalism and Authoritative Knowledge of Content: A New Incompatibilist Strategy

A typical strategy of those who seek to show that externalism is compatible with authoritative knowledge of content is to show that externalism does nothing to undermine the claim that all thinkers can at any time form correct and justified self-ascriptive judgements concerning their occurrent thoughts . In reaction, most incompatibilists have assumed the burden of denying that externalism is compatible with this claim about self-ascription. Here I suggest another way to attack the compatibilist strategy. I aim to show that forming a justified true self-ascriptive judgement about one’s occurrent thought does not amount to or imply that one ‘knows the content’ of the self-ascribed thought. While the difference between present-tense self-ascription and knowledge of content has previously been brought out using the familiar trappings of world-switching examples, 1 here I attempt to establish the difference by appeal to actual (real-life) memory-involvingcases. To this end, I present a ‘recollection problem’ and argue that, so long as one conflates present-tense self-ascription and self-knowledge of content, there can be no satisfactory response to this problem. The result is that, even if the compatibilist strategy is correct in what it asserts about self-ascription, it has not delivered the relevant goods if it aims to establish a thesis asserting externalism’s compatibility with knowledge of content. I conclude by speculating how the recollection argument to be presented here can be transformed, from an argument against the compatibilist strategy, into an argument for incompatibilism.

Should have known

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).

Epistemic extendedness, testimony, and the epistemology of instrument-based belief

In Relying on others [Goldberg, S. 2010a. Relying on others: An essay in epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press], I argued that, from the perspective of an interest in epistemic assessment, the testimonial belief-forming process should be regarded as interpersonally extended. At the same time, I explicitly rejected the extendedness model for beliefs formed through reliance on a mere mechanism, such as a clock. In this paper, I try to bolster my defense of this asymmetric treatment. I argue that a crucial assumption lying behind the argument I used to establish interpersonal extendedness in testimony cases does not apply to beliefs formed through reliance on instruments. In this respect, at least, there appears to be something epistemically distinctive about relying on another epistemic agent.

ANTI-INDIVIDUALISM, CONCEPTUAL OMNISCIENCE, AND SKEPTICISM

Given anti-individualism, a subjectmight have a priori (non-empirical)knowledge that she herself is thinking thatp, have complete and exhaustiveexplicational knowledge of all of the conceptscomposing the content that p, and yetstill need empirical information (e.g.regarding her embedding conditions and history)prior to being in a position to apply herexhaustive conceptual knowledge in aknowledgeable way to the thought that p. This result should be welcomed byanti-individualists: it squares with everythingthat compatibilist-minded anti-individualistshave said regarding e.g. the compatibility ofanti-individualism and basic self-knowledge;and more importantly it contains the crux of aresponse to McKinsey-style arguments againstanti-individualism.

The Very Idea of Computer Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

Do computers have beliefs? I argue that anyone who answers in the affirmative holds a view that is incompatible with what I shall call the commonsense approach to the propositional attitudes. My claims shall be two. First,the commonsense view places important constraints on what can be acknowledged as a case of having a belief. Second, computers – at least those for which having a belief would be conceived as having a sentence in a belief box – fail to satisfy some of these constraints. This second claim can best be brought out in the context of an examination of the idea of computer self-knowledge and self-deception, but the conclusion is perfectly general: the idea that computers are believers, like the idea that computers could have self-knowledge or be self-deceived, is incompatible with the commonsense view. The significance of the argument lies in the choice it forces on us: whether to revise our notion of belief so as to accommodate the claim that computers are believers, or to give up on that claim so as to preserve our pretheoretic notion of the attitudes. We cannot have it both ways.

Radical Interpretation, Understanding, and the Testimonial Transmission of Knowledge

In this paper I argue that RadicalInterpretation (RI), taken to be a methodological doctrine regarding the conditions under which an interpretation of an utterance is both warranted and correct, has unacceptable implications for the conditions on (ascriptions of) understanding. The notion of understanding at play is that which underwrites the testimonial transmission of knowledge. After developing this notion I argue that, on the assumption of RI, hearers will fail to have such understanding in situations in which we should want to maintain otherwise. The overall effect of the argument is to provide a heretofore unexamined source of motivation for anti-individualistic approaches to the semantics of utterances.

Defending philosophy in the face of systematic disagreement

1. Editors Introduction Diego E. Machuca 2. Disagreeing with the Pyrrhonist? Otavio Bueno 3. The Role of Disagreement in Pyrrhonian and Cartesian Skepticism Markus Lammenranta 4. A Neo-Pyrrhonian Approach to the Epistemology of Disagreement Diego E. Machuca 5. Moral Disagreement: Actual vs. Possible Folke Tersman 6. The Fragility of Moral Disagreement Zed Adams 7. How Skeptical is the Equal Weight View? Brandon Carey and Jonathan Matheson 8. Disagreement, Skepticism, and Track-Record Arguments Duncan Pritchard 9. Disagreement and Defeat Clayton Littlejohn 10. Disagreement: The Skeptical Arguments from Peerhood and Symmetry Nathan L. King 11. Dealing with Disagreement from the First-Person Perspective: A Probabilist Proposal Trent Dougherty 12. The Problem of Historical Variability Nathan Ballantyne 13. Is Philosophical Knowledge Possible? Hilary Kornblith 14. Defending Philosophy in the Face of Systematic Disagreement Sandy GoldbergFor the Pyrrhonian skeptic, disagreement is an integral part of the skeptical way of inquiry (see Pyrrhonian Outlines I 165).1 The fact that there is undecidable disagreement about a given issue makes the Pyrrhonian skeptic unable to decide that issue, and suspension of judgment emerges. But is suspension of judgment the appropriate response in this case? In this paper, I address two related topics. In the bulk of the paper, I examine critically Jonathan Barnes’ contention to the effect that disagreement alone is not enough to yield suspension of judgment; additional Agrippa’s modes need to be invoked as well (Barnes 1990: ch. 1). I argue that nothing prevents the Pyrrhonian skeptic from suspending judgment only due to disagreement. In fact, that is exactly what Sextus himself points out: “And because of the dispute [that is, the undecidable disagreement over a certain issue] we cannot choose or reject anything, and so end in suspension of judgment” (PH I 165; see Barnes 1990: 17). But does any form of disagreement yield suspension of judgment? To answer this question I consider recent debates about the epistemology of disagreement (see, e.g., Feldman & Warfield 2010). According to the Total Evidence View, what is reasonable for us to believe depends on the total evidence available to us.2 I argue that this view clearly provides a sufficient condition for the Pyrrhonian skeptic to suspend judgment due to disagreement alone. If the total evidence available to us—including the Pyrrhonian skeptic—does not favor any side of an issue over which there is disagreement, suspension of judgment is the natural outcome. In order to examine these topics, however, it is important to be clear about the nature of the disagreement the Pyrrhonian skeptic is involved with and whether the Pyrrhonist is indeed part of the disagreement. I discuss these issues in the bulk of the paper (Sections 2–4). The identification of the relevant kind of disagreement the Pyrrhonist is engaged with paves the way for the ensuing discussion about the connection between disagreement and suspension of judgment (Sections 5–7). Disagreeing with the Pyrrhonist?

Belief and its linguistic expression: Towards a belief box account of first-person authority

In this paper I characterize the problem of first-person authority as it confronts the proponent of the belief box conception of belief, and I develop the groundwork for a belief box account of that authority. If acceptable, the belief box account calls into question (by undermining a popular motivation for) the thesis that first-person authority is not to be traced to a truth-tracking relation between first-person opinions themselves and the beliefs which they are about.