(1938-2024)
It is with sadness that we acknowledge the passing of Alvin Goldman, a Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University from 2002 until his retirement in 2018. Born on October 1, 1938, he died on August 4, 2024. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1960, and his PhD from Princeton in 1965. He taught at the University of Michigan (1963-1980), followed by positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1980-1983) and the University of Arizona (1983-2002), before coming to Rutgers.
Goldman was, without doubt, one of the most important epistemologists of the last 80 years. In a 2016 Leiter Report poll of about 400 of his peers, he emerged as the second most influential Anglophone epistemologist working in the period since 1945 (after only the then late W. V. O. Quine). Goldman also made major contributions to cognitive science, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, metaphysics, and action theory.
Goldman’s approach to epistemology was resolutely naturalistic. His work sought to explain how epistemic states – such as knowledge and justification – fit into the natural world. His “Causal Theory of Knowing” (Journal of Philosophy, 1967) analyzed knowledge as a causal relation between facts in the world and an agent’s beliefs. One of his most important contributions to epistemology was his development and defense of process reliabilism about justification, which analyzes the justificatory status of a belief in terms of the reliability of the psychological processes that caused the belief (“What is Justified Belief?,” in Pappas (ed), Justification and Knowledge). This was a revolutionary approach to justification. It parted ways with internalist theories of justification (the dominant approach at the time), which took justification to depend on factors that are internally accessible to the believer. It also rejected the “current time slice” approach to justification, according to which the justificatory status of an agent’s belief depends only on facts that obtain at the time of the belief. According to Goldman, any adequate theory of justification will need to take into account the belief’s prior history. Consequently, no time-slice view could be right. Goldman developed and refined his reliabilist theory over the course of his career (e.g., Epistemology and Cognition, 1986; “Internalism Exposed”, Journal of Philosophy, 1999).
Goldman was also a pioneer of social epistemology. Historically, much of epistemology has had an individualistic bent. In the tradition of Descartes, it has focused on the perspective of an agent who is trying to attain truth (or justification or knowledge), on their own, in isolation from their social surroundings. Social epistemology, by contrast, looks at the role of social practices in generating knowledge in both individuals and groups. Goldman’s Knowledge in a Social World (1999) offered a distinctively reliabilist version of this approach, examining how social structures can be evaluated in terms of their truth-conduciveness. This book laid the groundwork for much subsequent work in social epistemology.
Goldman also had enormous influence in cognitive science. His 2006 book, Simulating Minds, provided an influential and systematic defense of simulationism, the idea that we often attribute mental states to others by first simulating a mental process in ourselves. Throughout
his work, he explored the ways in which work in cognitive science can fruitfully bear on other areas of philosophy, particularly epistemology and metaphysics (e.g., Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences, 1992; Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science, 1993).
Goldman was the author of 10 books and over 150 articles, many of them now classics in the field. A Guggenheim Fellow from 1975-76, in 1991—92 he served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. From 2005-2014 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the epistemology journal Episteme. A Romanell Prize Lecturer of the American Philosophical Association in 2010, he was also a co-winner in 2015 of the Lebowitz Prize for outstanding achievement in the field of philosophy.
For more than 50 years, Goldman was a dedicated and supportive teacher, mentor, and colleague in the departments he served. His kindness and encouragement shaped the careers of generations of philosophers, who now mourn his absence.
(Robert Beddor)
