Gilbert Harman

Gilbert Harman (born 1938) is an American philosopher, teaching at Princeton University since 1963, who has published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller co-directed the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory. Harman has taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.

He currently holds the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professorship in Philosophy. He has been named a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in Paris in 2005. In 2009 he received Princeton University's Behrman award for distinguished achievement in the humanities. His acceptance speech was titled "We need a linguistics department."

Harman has a BA from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. His most influential teachers were Michael Scriven, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Noam Chomsky. Some of his well-known students include Stephen Stich at Rutgers, James Dreier at Brown, Nicholas Sturgeon at Cornell, David Wong at Duke and Joshua Knobe at Yale.

His daughter Elizabeth Harman is also a philosopher and a member of the philosophy department and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Harman's 1965 account of the role of "inference to the best explanation"—inferring the existence of that which we need for the best explanation of observable phenomena—has been very influential. In later work, he argued that all inference or reasoning should be conceived as rational "change in view," balancing conservatism against coherence, where simplicity and explanatory considerations are relevant to positive coherence and where avoiding inconsistency is relevant to negative coherence. He has expressed doubts about appeals to a priori knowledge and has argued that logic and decision theory are theories of implication and consistency and should not be interpreted as theories that can be followed: they are not theories of inference or reasoning.

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