ANTI‐INDIVIDUALISM: MIND AND LANGUAGE, KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTIFICATION

In Anti-Individualism, Sanford Goldberg presents a theory of testimony and testimonial knowledge, and considers the implications of this theory for philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. According to Goldberg, plausible assumptions about testimonial knowledge provide important motivation for the view that linguistic meaning is not determined exclusively by purely internal states and processes, and that the same is true of the representational content of propositional attitudes. Instead of being determined by purely internal factors, such as the states and processes that are considered in cognitive neuroscience, or the states and processes that are studied by computational psychology, meaning and content depend, in part, on relations between individual agents and the linguistic communities that they inhabit. In short, according to Goldberg, considerations pertaining to testimonial knowledge provide motivation for semantic externalism. He also maintains that this motivation is largely independent of the arguments for externalism that are familiar from the writings of Kripke, Putnam, and Burge. The line of thought leading to these conclusions occupies the first half of the book. In the second half, Goldberg turns his attention to epistemological issues. What is it, he asks, for a testimonial belief to count as epistemically justified, and what is it for a testimonial belief to count as epistemically rational? He argues that these epistemic properties involve reliability in at least two ways. First, in order for testimonial beliefs to exemplify the properties, the relevant believers must be equipped with, and make use of, a reliable ability to determine whether testimony is called into question by defeaters—that is, by considerations that challenge testimony, suggesting that it may not be trustworthy. And second, the beliefs must derive from testimonial sources that are in fact reliable. Now, as is customary, Goldberg takes reliability to be intimately related to truth, and therefore to depend on factors that are external to the believer. It follows that the epistemic status of a testimonial belief is doubly dependent on external factors. According to Goldberg, then, when we reflect on the justification and rationality of testimonial beliefs, we gain a new appreciation of the plausibility of epistemological externalism—new in the sense that it is independent of the arguments for externalism that appear elsewhere in the literature.