reviews


Book Reviews 173 

needs of teenage girls, and it holds the 
potential to inform decisions regarding 
serials subscriptions for collections that 
serve adolescents. A copy should be in 
all women’s studies collections.—Flo-
rence M. Jumonville, University of New 
Orleans. 

Goldman, Alvin I. Knowledge in a Social 
World. New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 
1999. 407p. $70, alk. paper, cloth (ISBN 
0-1982-3777-4); $19.95 paper (ISBN 0­
1982-3820-7). LC 98-43283. 

Alvin Goldman, professor of philosophy 
at the University of Arizona, seeks to 
evaluate social institutions and practices 
on the basis of how well they increase 
human knowledge, as opposed to igno­
rance and error. His conception of knowl­
edge involves a strong commitment to 
truth, which he calls “veritism.” For 
Goldman, knowledge is defined as true 
belief, not merely accepted belief or opin­
ion. What makes a belief true is its hav­
ing the right kind of relationship to the 
world or reality; putting it baldly, if a be­
lief matches reality, it is true. What we 
seek when we seek knowledge is true 
belief. Institutions and practices that fos­
ter true belief are good and should be 
promoted; institutions and practices that 
result in false belief (error) or the absence 
of true belief (ignorance) are bad and 
should be avoided or corrected. Science 
is, for Goldman, an example of a social 
practice that has good prospects for lead­
ing us to knowledge, whereas the news 
programming of commercially oriented 
media companies has less of a chance for 
leading us to true belief and is, therefore, 
a candidate for correction or regulation.

 The author seeks to distance himself 
from contemporary thinkers who profess 
various forms of skepticism about truth 
in the form of social constructivism, 
postmodernism, cultural relativism, or 
the sociology of knowledge. Claiming 
that these thinkers suffer from 
“veriphobia,” Goldman devotes a chap­
ter to exposing the flaws in their argu­
ments. He proceeds to explain in detail 
the theory of truth that he advocates, and 

he outlines a framework for employing 
it in the evaluation of social practices. He 
then applies the theory to social practices 
in general, including testimony (the 
transmission of observed information 
from one person to others), the technol­
ogy and economics of communication, 
and speech regulation. Special attention 
is devoted to four special domains: sci­
ence, law, democracy, and education. 
Goldman’s ambitious work is both theo­
retical and practical, descriptive and nor­
mative: he develops a truth-linked social 
epistemology in rich philosophical de­
tail, he then evaluates social practices on 
the basis of how well they produce true 
beliefs.

 Goldman’s epistemology may arouse 
surprise and suspicion in librarians, 
many of whom would be classified as 
“constructivist veriphobes” in his termi­
nology. When any theory of knowledge 
is articulated by librarians at all, it is usu­
ally a form of constructivism in which 
knowledge is distinguished from infor­
mation by a cognitive operation of the 
user, sometimes referred to as construct­
ing meaning. According to this view, the 
library user takes information (raw data) 
and does something to it (processes it, 
interprets it, manipulates it, forms an 
understanding of it) and thus transforms 
information into knowledge. When this 
process is performed collectively by cre­
dentialed individuals organized into dis­
ciplines, librarians refer to it as scholarly 
communication. The purpose of the re­
search library is to aid scholarly commu­
nication and the production of new 
knowledge so defined. The notion that 
knowledge is connected to any norma­
tive concept such as truth is usually left 
out of the equation. When librarians of 
the constructivist bent do speak of truth, 
they are likely to understand it in terms 
of social consensus or agreement rather 
than a belief’s having the right relation­
ship to the world. A truth-linked episte­
mology such as Goldman’s would there­
fore arouse the suspicion that it would 
result in the privileging of one group’s 
truth over another’s. 



 

174 College & Research Libraries 

Although librarians sometimes speak 
as though they are social constructivists, 
librarian practice in fact looks a lot like 
Goldman’s veritism. Take, for example, 
the accuracy literature in the evaluation 
of reference services. For more than thirty 
years, library and information science 
researchers have evaluated reference ser­
vice in terms of the accuracy of librarian 
responses to user questions, where ac­
curacy is defined as the correct or true 
answer in Goldman’s sense. When ref­
erence services do not result in a suffi­
cient increase in true belief (the 55 per­
cent rule), strategies are devised (follow­
up questions) to improve and correct the 
practice. If Goldman is correct, librarians 
should continue this type of research and 
correcting practice instead of focusing ex­
clusively on non-truth-based concepts of 
evaluation such as user satisfaction. One 
application of Goldman’s theory could 
be a comparison of the truth-producing 
practice of reference librarians with the 
ability of Internet search engines to pro­
vide accurate answers to a user ’s query 
per unit of user time.

 Goldman’s work also has implica­
tions for collection development and li­
brary instruction. He applies his veritistic 
epistemology to issues such as the peer 
review of electronic publications, recent 
copyright legislation, collaborative learn-

Index to advertisers
 
Academic Press 155 
ACRL 135, 178 
AIAA 114, 145 
Archival Products 154 
Assoc. Research Libraries 91 
CHOICE 168, 177 
EBSCO 92 
Elsevier Science 103, 105, 107 
Getty Trust 126 
Grove’s Dictionaries 98 
ISI cover 2 
Library Technologies 95 
Library Technology Alliance 120 
Marcive cover 3 
OCLC 117 
R.R. Bowker cover 4 

March 2000 

ing, and critical thinking—reaching con­
clusions that most often back up librar­
ian practice in these areas. The one weak­
ness of this book is that in attempting to 
cover such broad territory, Goldman’s 
practical proposals are sometimes lack­
ing in details and specifics. Veriphobes 
and veritists alike, however, will benefit 
from the clarity of Goldman’s analysis 
of the thorny issues surrounding truth, 
knowledge, and social practice.—Marc 
Meola, Temple University. 

Print Culture in a Diverse America. Ed. 
James P. Danky and Wayne A. 
Wiegand. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Pr. 
(History of Communication Series), 
1998. 291p. $49.95, acid-free paper, 
cloth (ISBN 0-2520-2398-6); $27.95 pa­
per (ISBN 0-2520-6699-5). LC 97­
33935. 

The emerging field of print cultural stud­
ies has been greatly enhanced by the pub­
lication of this new work. The editors 
have assembled a collection of important 
essays that were presented during the first 
conference—in 1995, in Madison, Wiscon­
sin—of the Center for the History of Print 
Culture in Modern America. The result of 
their labors is an anthology of ideas about 
the value of print, in its variant forms, that 
is groundbreaking in establishing link­
ages between libraries, cultural commu­
nities, and the printed word. 

In his introduction, Wayne Wiegand 
succinctly describes a “rapidly emerging 
scholarship on reading within a much 
broader shift in the focus of humanities 
research ‘from culture as text to culture 
as agency and practice.’” Print cultural 
studies can be viewed as “one manifes­
tation” of this movement. Yet, Wiegand 
is quick to remind the reader that schol­
arship in this emerging field has, to a 
large degree, excluded close investiga­
tion and analysis of the twentieth cen­
tury, a time period marked by a rapid 
increase in the utility of print among 
America’s culturally diverse popula­
tions. Investigation of print culture in 
this century is also complicated by an 
array of media that include newspapers