Download Summary of two lectures, by Alvin Goldman (Philosophy, Rutgers

Summary of two lectures, by Alvin Goldman (Philosophy, Rutgers University).
College de France, 9 and 19 Mars, 2012
Lecture #1 Troubles for Collective Epistemology
Social epistemology, as I envisage it, is a field of study that encompasses three branches.
The first branch is interpersonal social epistemology. This branch studies the situation of
a single inquirer who forms beliefs (or other credal attitudes) about propositions with the
help of “social evidence”. “Social evidence” here refers to any evidence provided by one
or more other people that bears on the propositions in question. For example, someone
(else) might assert a proposition’s truth, or might disclose the fact that they believe it or
reject it. What epistemologists call the problem of “testimonial” evidence falls in the
ambit of interpersonal social epistemology, including the problem of how a hearer should
decide which expert to trust when several experts offer different opinions. The problem
of “peer disagreement” also falls under the heading of interpersonal social epistemology.
A second branch of social epistemology, which comprises the subject-matter of the first
lecture, is collective social epistemology. This problem area starts from the assumption
that there are group, or collective, epistemic agents, such as teams, committees, or
political parties that make certain judgments, or express opinions. Many recent
philosophers contend such group entities exist, and that they have propositional attitudes
like intentions and beliefs. If they have beliefs, these beliefs can presumably studied
from an epistemological point of view, just as the beliefs of single individuals are studied
epistemologically. For example, we can assess their beliefs as justified or unjustified.
Now, when we evaluate the justifiedness of an individual’s belief, we focus on how the
belief is related to other beliefs of theirs. Does it logically follow from, or is it
inductively supported by, their other (justified) beliefs? Was it retained by memory from
a previous belief? Was it caused by suitable perceptual experiences? In short, the
justificational status of a particular belief of an individual depends on other mental states
of that individual. If group entities are real, and have an existence comparable to that of
individuals, the epistemology of such group entities should presumably depend similarly
on their own mental states. But troubles arise when we try to pursue such an analysis in
detail. There seem to be cases (some of which are produced in this lecture) in which the
justifiedness of a group belief seems to depend on the justifiedness of its members’
beliefs more than on the justifiedness of its own beliefs. And the question of whether it
can preserve the justifiedness of a belief over time seems obscure because there seems to
be nothing comparable to an individual’s memory that holds for groups. Moreover, the
most attractive theory of justification (by my lights) is process reliabilism, which implies
that the justifiedness of a belief depends on the psychological processes by which it is
produced. But it is hard to see how this theory can be applied to the case of a group
belief. Reflection on such “hard” cases shows that collective epistemology is a very
enticing subject, though hardly studied at all. It needs to be examined from its very
foundations.
Lecture #2. Democracy, Knowledge, and Power
The third branch of social epistemology is institutional social epistemology, or systemsoriented, social epistemology. This third branch of social epistemology considers social
systems, or social institutions, as entities with distinctive causal influences on the
formation of belief. Here the systems or institutions are not considered as bearers, or
occupants, of belief states, but only as entities that “house” individuals who have beliefs
and other credal states. Some of these systems, such as science, education, and perhaps
legal trials have the primary or “constitutive” goal of producing beliefs or judgments that
are true rather than false. For example, although legal systems vary from country to
country and from period to period, they at least have as their primary aim the production
of judgments that are correct rather than incorrect (insofar as this is feasible). Thus, they
can in principle be evaluated by social epistemology as better or worse along this
epistemic, truth-determining dimension. Even when truth is not the main aim of a social
system or institution, producing true beliefs or accurate information may be an important
sub-goal of such a system. Its efficacy in achieving its primary aim can again be
evaluated epistemologically. (This, of course, is a substantial departure from traditional
epistemology, but it retains the field’s traditional aim of evaluating methods, practices, or
techniques in terms of their advancement of the truth-aim.) Many current theorists of
democracy hold that what makes democracy good, as a species of political system, is
fundamentally a matter of pooling the informational states of the citizenry into judgments
by the group as a whole. The Condorcet Jury Theorem suggests that majoritarian voting
has informational benefits, and thereby provides a very good argument for choosing
democracy. The present lecture offers a rather different approach, but which also makes
knowledge important. It departs from the (purely) “epistemic” approach to democracy on
the grounds that most votes in political systems are not taken on factual matters, but on
questions of what joint actions to take or what laws or institutions to adopt. So the
Condorcet Jury Theorem has no straightforward application to them. This lecture
presents an alternative approach to democracy, centering on the notion of power. What is
good about democracy, it is suggested, is its emphasis on (approximate) equality of
political power. Power isn’t really worth much unless it is accompanied by essential
knowledge or information. Thus, a crucial epistemic ingredient is necessary for the
ability of democracy to achieve its distinctive kind of success. This is shown by an
analysis (adapted from Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World, 1999) that examines
what happens when citizens vote to elect someone to political office. Each voting citizen
faces a core voter question, and if many voters believe the true answers to their core voter
questions, the results will be good from a certain preference-satisfaction point of view.
Thus, democracy’s success hinges on the capacities of citizens to acquire core voter
knowledge. This, in turn, depends on the existence of suitable institutional factors that
provide positive assistance in obtaining the relevant kinds of true belief, or knowledge.
Thus, democracy depends critically on “epistemic” success, even if its constitutive aim
isn’t epistemic (in the way that science’s constitutive aim is epistemic).