a shortcoming of Goldman's epistemic evaluation of social practices

In 1999 Alvin Goldman published Knowledge in a Social World (KSW). In this book he presents a comprehensive social theory of knowledge. One of his main aims is to evaluate social practices with regard to their epistemic virtues. For this goal he developed the concept of veritistic value. Veritistic value is a measure for the truth of beliefs and the influence social practices have on this amount of truth. Social Epistemology recently published a special issue on KSW with six review essays and a reply from Goldman (Remedios, 2000). A wide range of issues has been addressed in these reviews. However, one important shortcoming of the concept of veritistic value has not been discussed in these and other reviews. It appears that the acquisition of veritistic value sometimes conflicts with the rational consideration of evidence. This makes veritistic value inappropriate as the single measure for the epistemic value of social practices. This shortcoming will be explained in this paper. According to Goldman (1999, p. 4) people’s dominant epistemic goal is to obtain true 2beliefs. Veritistic value is intended to be a measure for the amount of truth people possess (Goldman, 2000, p. 324). Goldman distinguishes between fundamental veritistic value and instrumental veritistic value. Fundamental veritistic value is a property of beliefs. Practices have instrumental veritistic value insofar as they promote or impede the acquisition of fundamental veritistic value (Goldman, 1999, p. 87). Goldman assigns fundamental veritistic value (V-value) in the following way. If someone beliefs a true proposition or rejects a false proposition, the associated V-value is 1. If s/he withholds judgement, the V-value is 0.5. If s/he beliefs a false proposition or rejects a true proposition, the V-value is 0. Goldman calls