To the Best of Our Knowledge

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,...