There is no more prolific analytical philosopher than Alvin I. Goldman when
it comes to social epistemology. During the past two decades, he has done
more than any other analytical philosopher to set the tone for how social
epistemology ought to be conceptualized. However, while Goldman has provided
numerous contributions to our understanding of how applied epistemology can
assist not only philosophy, but other fields of learning such as the
sciences, law, and communication theory, there are concerns with the way he
conceptualizes the foundations of social epistemology. One is that he
somewhat problematically partitions off social epistemology from traditional
analytic epistemology in ways that make the latter, but not the former,
naturalistic and reliabilist (on his construal of naturalism and
reliabilism). Another difficulty is that he seems not to recognize that
social epistemology poses a rather embarrassingly potential problem for
traditional epistemology, namely, it exposes traditional epistemology?s
excessive individualism. That Goldman seems not to recognize this is
evidenced by the fact that in his conceptualization of the foundations of
epistemology he retains traditional epistemology as an area of philosophical
inquiry on its own terms, without arguing that elements of the social might
well have to be taken into account by traditional analyses of human
knowledge. Thus, to put it in the terms of another social epistemologist,
Steve Fuller, Goldman?s social epistemology is not revisionistic, though
Goldman himself insists that it is normative. This leads to a third problem
for Goldman?s social epistemology, namely, that it contains no justified true
belief analysis of the nature of social knowledge.
Sources and citizens: An essay in applied epistemology
