To the Best of Our Knowledge

Abstract

According to the student evaluations from my last introductory epistemology class, the unit on epistemic justification was the least exciting part of the course. This wasn't particularly surprising to me, since the literature on justification is a bit stagnant. It can mostly be characterized by internalists going back and forth about foundationalism and coherentism and externalists producing ever more complicated versions of reliabilism. Sanford Goldberg's newest book gives yet another theory of justification. But the deep and programmatic work breaks the monotonous mold in very important (and satisfying) ways. Goldberg bridges the internalist/externalist divide in a way that takes seriously the intuitions on both sides. Moreover, Goldberg not only aims to give an extensionally adequate theory of epistemic justification, but he also digs into hard questions about the nature of epistemic normativity. According to Goldberg, our epistemic obligations are rooted in the expectations we have of each other. As such, he flips the standard order of explanation. And in tying our individual epistemic obligations to our social nature, Goldberg brings together big, previously distinct projects in individual and social epistemology. It would be impossible to do justice to the whole theory in a short summary here. I'll nonetheless attempt to give a broad overview of the project before briefly developing a worry for the account and highlighting an area for future work.To the Best of Our Knowledge starts by carving out the target of Goldberg's theorizing. He stipulates that a belief is ‘epistemically proper’ when it “satisfies all of the distinctively epistemic standards on knowledge” (13). He then argues that epistemic propriety is (ultima facie) epistemic justification, not knowledge, since beliefs can satisfy the distinctly epistemic standards on knowledge without being knowledge. Goldberg thinks, for example, that a belief can be Gettiered but still satisfy all of the distinctly epistemic standards on knowledge because the relevant standards are those that apply to us in virtue of our epistemic agency (23). Something notable here is Goldberg's methodology: Goldberg doesn't assume, as many authors do, that understanding epistemic normativity just reduces to understanding the normativity of epistemic justification or knowledge. Instead, Goldberg starts with the nature of epistemology itself and asks about the evaluations it contains. This speaks to the ambitious programmatic nature of the account of epistemic normativity.Chapters 1 and 2 lay out the broad structure of epistemic propriety. On Goldberg's picture, it contains two elements, a reliabilist element and a responsibilist element. Chapter 2 is primarily dedicated to motivating the two-part conception of epistemic justification. Goldberg argues that evaluations of justification mirror many other kinds of evaluation in having a ‘hybrid structure’ involving core criteria and general expectations that must be met in order for the evaluation to apply. The aim of chapters 3 through 6 is to flesh out both parts of the account of justification. Chapters 3 and 4 are dedicated to the core criteria, while chapters 5 and 6 flesh out the general expectations that believers must also meet for their beliefs to be justified.In chapter 3, Goldberg argues that there are default defeasible permissions we have to rely on certain belief-forming processes, like visual perception. The beliefs formed by these processes serve as the foundation for the rest of our epistemically proper beliefs. Here we start to see the social elements enter into the account, since Goldberg argues that we all have default permissions to rely on anyone's belief-forming process of the right kind, not just our own. Chapter 4 extends the account of the core criteria to all justified beliefs (not just those formed by privileged belief-forming processes). In these chapters, Goldberg develops what he calls a ‘Coherence-Infused Reliabilism’ where the coherence of a belief with the agent's other beliefs can play some role in it being justified, while still being a reliabilist view at heart.Chapters 5 and 6 primarily work out the responsibilist element of the account. As I mentioned earlier, the big claim here is that epistemic norms apply to us because of the expectations others legitimately have of us, and not vice versa. Others expect us to meet the core criteria of epistemic propriety and play our “social-epistemic role(s) properly,” which is why we're subject to epistemic norms on this picture. If it works, this kind of picture naturally explains why we're subject to the core criteria of epistemic justification. It can also explain why different agents are properly held to different epistemic standards, for example, why doctors should have certain information, be particularly sensitive to certain kinds of errors, and so on, while the same is not true of some nondoctors. The main focus of chapter 6 is ways in which failures of epistemic responsibility can lead to negative epistemic evaluations, with a particular focus on cases of there being evidence we should have had but do not have. A constant theme here is the ways that the responsibilist elements of the picture work in service of the reliabilist core. In that sense, the picture of normativity that Goldberg offers is broadly truth-focused and reliabilist.Chapter 7 responds to several objections to the overall picture, but for brevity (well, word limits), I won't recount those worries here. Instead I'll turn to posing a challenge for the account and highlighting an area for possible future research.First, the challenge: Goldberg can be seen as offering a kind of reduction of epistemic normativity to the normativity that makes epistemic expectations legitimate. So, for the account to work, we must be able to draw a line between legitimate and nonlegitimate epistemic expectations. In chapter 5, Goldberg argues that what makes expectations legitimate is that they reflect presuppositions of our informational-exchange and practical engagements with each other. Goldberg gives a nonepistemic example of someone whose house is passed over in the weekly neighborhood garbage collection. Goldberg thinks that that person can legitimately expect their garbage to be properly collected, and they can be upset when it isn't. Simplified a bit, on his account, we're entitled to expectations when “calling the expectations into question would undermine some fundamental aspect of our practices of epistemic reliance on, or our practical engagements with, others” or it's part of a culturally specific legitimate practice and “calling into question the expectation would call into question the legitimacy of the practice” (170). Legitimacy of the practice is understood in terms of it being “ongoing and/or recognized,” its standards being widely acknowledged, and there not being any serious questions as to the propriety of either the practice or its standards (165).I worry that this reduction might not work in some cases. We could imagine a social practice, for example, where a group of agents believe that Plato's heaven exists and is full of baby goats (perhaps as part of a broader social practice of believing and reinforcing practically irrelevant happiness-conducive beliefs). Presumably the expectations of each other's beliefs this practice produces are illegitimate, but Goldberg's standards don't seem to rule them out. The most natural way to rule them out would be by appeal to epistemic standards, but of course, that would be circular on Goldberg's picture.In section 5.6, Goldberg considers ‘epistemic practices’, which are practices that contain an expectation that participants meet an epistemic standard, like how we can expect a doctor to be familiar with basic medical knowledge. Goldberg argues these practices have an added condition of legitimacy, namely, being reliability-conducive. To argue for that, Goldberg gives examples of practices that have reliability-decreasing expectations and argues that we're not subject to those expectations. But, I don't find this argument particularly compelling, for two reasons: First, the cases Goldberg considers are cases where there are natural, practical, or institutional explanations of why we wouldn't want reliability-decreasing elements to be part of the practice. The main example involves a medical community that has an unreliable medical-belief-forming practice and a single doctor who bucks that trend. In that case, our intuition that the reliability-decreasing expectation is illegitimate can be explained by appeal to other parts of the practice or the broader role of the practice in society. So it's not clear we need the epistemic condition to make sense of why the reliability-decreasing expectation of the doctor is illegitimate. Second, there is a lurking circularity worry here that comes with embedding an epistemic condition in the conditions for expectation legitimacy, since those are supposed to be the conditions that undergird epistemic normativity in the first place. For those reasons, I worry that the main claim of section 5.6 isn't particularly well supported.But even if I'm wrong and Goldberg can defend the claims of section 5.6, I think Goldberg will also incorrectly predict that the practice I described above is not an epistemic one, despite it being about beliefs. On Goldberg's view, a practice is epistemic when it requires the practitioners to meet an epistemic standard, such as having evidence of the goats. This practice only requires agents to have the goat beliefs, not to have evidence for them. So overall, I'm not sure Goldberg has landed on the right reduction of epistemic norms to social practices and expectations. In future work, I hope that defenders of this account can flesh out further how this kind of reduction should work.On a more productive note, I think Goldberg's account opens new doors for thinking about epistemic normativity. One of the main questions for accounts of epistemic normativity for groups (like juries, boards, etc.) is how to ground that normativity. The theoretically easiest assumption here is that epistemic normativity primarily bears on individuals, and if it bears on groups, it bears on groups in virtue of bearing on individuals. One of the most exciting aspects of Goldberg's account of epistemic normativity is it makes epistemic normativity a product of groups in the first place. As such, the account occupies an advantageous position for making sense of social epistemic norms, like the norms that face small groups, corporations, and even large institutions like the criminal justice system. Goldberg doesn't get into that in this book, but it's clear that this would be a fecund area of explanation for Goldberg's view.Overall then, To the Best of Our Knowledge is a major and important contribution to epistemology. It gives a sophisticated and complete view of the nature of epistemic normativity. It answers traditional questions about the nature of epistemic justification while also giving an explanation of how epistemic norms apply to us in virtue of our natures as social creatures. And even though the work is complex and dense, it is clearly written, and Goldberg regularly reminds the reader of how different parts of the picture come together. It is a well-worked-out project that all scholars of epistemic normativity should engage with.