Knowledge in a Social World offers a philosophy for the information age. Alvin Goldman explores new frontiers by creating a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Against the tides of postmodernism and social constructionism Goldman defends the integrity of truth and shows how to promote it by well-designed forms of social interaction. From science to education, from law to democracy, he shows why and how public institutions should seek knowledge-enhancing practices. The result is a bold, (...) timely, and systematic treatment of the philosophical foundations of an information society. (shrink)

Robert Grosseteste was one of the most independent and vigorous Englishmen of the Middle Ages--a medieval Dr. Johnson in his powers of mind and personality. Of humble birth, he lived for many years in obscurity and emerged only late in life as a national figure, deeply conservative and profoundly critical of the contemporary world. As a scientist, theologian, and pastoral leader, he was rooted in an English tradition going back beyond the Norman Conquest. This comprehensive study of one of England's (...) great intellects by the late Sir Richard W. Southern of Oxford University is an important contribution to the history of ideas. (shrink)

We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

In Contradiction advocates and defends the view that there are true contradictions, a view that flies in the face of orthodoxy in Western philosophy since Aristotle. The book has been at the center of the controversies surrounding dialetheism ever since its first publication in 1987. This second edition of the book substantially expands upon the original in various ways, and also contains the author’s reflections on developments over the last two decades. Further aspects of dialetheism are discussed in the companion (...) volume, Doubt Truth to be a Liar, also published by Oxford University Press in 2006. (shrink)

Epistemic minimalism affirms that mere true belief is sufficient for propositional knowledge. I construct a taxonomy of some specific forms of minimalism and locate within that taxonomy the distinct positions of various advocates of minimalism, including Alvin Goldman, Jaakko Hintikka, Crispin Sartwell, Wolfgang Lenzen, Franz von Kutschera, and others. I weigh generic minimalism against William Lycan’s objection that minimalism is incompatible with plausible principles about relations between knowledge, belief, and confidence. I argue that Lycan’s objection fails for equivocation but that (...) some specific forms of minimalism are better able than others to articulate that defense. (shrink)

Written over the last 18 months of his life and inspired by his interest in G. E. Moore's defence of common sense, this much discussed volume collects Wittgenstein's reflections on knowledge and certainty, on what it is to know a proposition for sure.

This chapter contains sections titled: Influences Exemplarism, truth, and knowledge Body and soul Free will Future contingency and modality Cosmology Time and eternity The eternity of the world.

Plato on Knowledge and Forms brings together a set of connected essays by Gail Fine, in her main area of research since the late 1970s: Plato's metaphysics and epistemology. She discusses central issues in Plato's metaphysics and epistemology, issues concerning the nature and extent of knowledge, and its relation to perception, sensibles, and forms; and issues concerning the nature of forms, such as whether they are universals or particulars, separate or immanent, and whether they are causes. A specially written introduction (...) draws together the themes of the volume, which will reward the attention of anyone interested in Plato or in ancient metaphysics and epistemology. (shrink)

This article examines the nature of Robert Grosseteste's commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics with particular reference to his “conclusions” . It is argued that the simple demonstrative appearance of the commentary, which is very much the result of the 64 conclusions, is in part an illusion. Thus, the exposition in the commentary is not simply based on the strict principles of the Posterior Analytics and on the proof-procedures of Euclidean geometry; rather the commentary is a complicated mixture of different elements (...) of twelfth-century texts and the scholarship of Grosseteste's day. (shrink)

Setting the thought of Robert Grosseteste within the broader context of the intellectual, religious, and social movements of his time, this study elucidates the evolution of his ideas on topics ranging from the mathematical laws that govern the movement of bodies, God as the mathematical Creator, and human knowledge, to religious experience and the place of humanity within the social, natural, and providential orders.

Epistemic logic is one of the most exciting areas in medieval philosophy. Neglected almost entirely after the end of the Middle Ages, it has been rediscovered by philosophers of the twentieth century. Epistemic Logic in the Later Middle Ages provides the first comprehensive study of the subject. Ivan Boh explores the contrast between epistemic and alethic conceptions of consequence, the general epistemic rules of consequence, the search for conditions of knowing contingent propositions, the problems of substitutivity in intentional contexts, the (...) considerations of epistemic/doxastic iterated modalities, and the problems of composite and divided senses in authors ranging from Abelard to Frachantian. Boh concludes with a comparison between medieval endeavors and the epistemic logic of our own times. Written in a clear and readable style with minimal symbolic apparatus, this book employs modern symbolism and conceptual frameworks, and complements the studies of the syntacticand semantic dimensions of medieval logic. (shrink)

What is knowledge? How hard is it for a person to have knowledge? Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge confronts contemporary philosophical attempts to answer those classic questions, offering a theory of knowledge that is unique in conceiving of knowledge in a non-absolutist way.

How can we know? How can we attain justified belief? These traditional questions in epistemology have inspired philosophers for centuries. Now, in this exceptional work, Alvin Goldman, distinguished scholar and leader in the fields of epistemology and mind, approaches such inquiries as legitimate methods or "pathways" to knowledge. He examines the notion of private and public knowledge, arguing for the epistemic legitimacy of private and introspective methods of gaining knowledge, yet acknowledging the equal importance of social and public mechanisms in (...) the quest for truth. Throughout, he addresses this opposition but proposes a rigorous framework that continues to resolve such contradictions, making this exciting text one of the most important contributions to the theory of knowledge in recent years. (shrink)

Language matters to epistemology for two separate reasons (although they are no doubt connected) -/- My interest in testimony derives from Gareth Evans, as does my conviction that it cannot be accommodated by the sort of account of knowledge which I attack in this paper. I believe I also owe to him my interest in the sorts of case I discuss in §4 below, where knowledge is retained under the risk that what would have been knowledge if the relevant fact (...) had still obtained is not knowledge because the fact no longer obtains. I have benefited from comments by Robert Brandom and Jonathan Dancy. (shrink)

The historically most central epistemological issue concerning perception, to which this article will be almost entirely devoted, is whether and how beliefs about physical objects and about the physical world generally can be justified or warranted on the basis of sensory or perceptual experience—where it is internalist justification, roughly having a reason to think that the belief in question is true, that is mainly in question (see the entry justification, epistemic: internalist vs. externalist conceptions of). This issue, commonly referred to (...) as “the problem of the external world,” divides into two closely related sub-issues, which correspond to the first two main sections below. The first of these issues has to do with the nature of sensory experience and its relation to the physical world; it is typically (though as we shall see not altogether perspicuously) formulated as the question of what are the immediate objects of awareness in sensory experience or, in a variant but essentially equivalent terminology, of what is given in such experience. Perhaps the most historically standard, though not currently the most popular answer to this question has been that it is sense-data (private, non-physical entities that actually have the immediately experienced sensory qualities) that are the immediate objects of awareness or that are given. The second issue has to do with the way in which beliefs about the physical world are justified on the basis of such sensory experience. If it is concluded that physical objects are not themselves given, the two main answers to this question are representationalism or indirect realism (the view that the immediate objects of experience represent or depict physical objects in a way that allows one to infer justifiably from such experience to the existence of the corresponding “external” objects) and phenomenalism (the view.. (shrink)