Alvin Goldman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alvin Ira Goldman (born 1938) is a professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA. He previously taught at the University of Michigan and at the University of Arizona. He earned his PhD from Princeton University and is married to the philosopher Holly Smith who is currently an administrator at Rutgers. His principal areas of research include Epistemology, Philosophy of mind, and Cognitive Science.

[edit] Work in epistemology

Goldman's paper titled A Causal Theory of Knowing in the Journal of Philosophy put forth a theory of justification in which belief was justified by proper causal connection between the fact which is believed and the existence of the belief. He later acknowledged problems with the original form of the theory, and in a series of papers developed several successive forms of reliabilism. These new theories retained causality as a contributing factor to the overall reliability of a belief forming process.

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.

More recently he has devoted his epistemological efforts to questions of social epistemology and has applied his approach to epistemology to such issues as the law (especially evidence), voting and media. He attempts to provide (in his words) a less radical view of social epistemology than those suggested by cultural theorists and postmodernist under that name. His approach uses tools of analytic philosophy especially formal epistemology to analyze problems in social knowledge. Some of this work is summarized in his book Knowledge in a Social World.

Goldman creates several different models for Causal Connections. [1]

[edit] External links

Rutgers bio page and list of publications

[edit] Writings

Action (1965)
"A Causal Theory of Knowing" in The Journal of Philosophy v. 64 (1967), pp. 335-372.
A Theory of Human Action (1970)
"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)