Alvin Goldman
Alvin Ira Goldman was an American philosopher who was emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.
Education and career
Goldman earned his BA from Columbia University and PhD from Princeton University and previously taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, Chicago and the University of Arizona. He joined the Rutgers faculty in 1994 and retired in 2018.Goldman was married to the ethicist Holly Martin Smith. He died on August 4, 2024, at the age of 85.
Philosophical work
Goldman did influential work on a wide range of philosophical topics, but his principal areas of research were epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.Action theory
Goldman's early book, A Theory of Human Action, 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. 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 the 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 described his "naturalistic" approach to epistemology as splitting "epistemology 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, 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 the 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."