Alvin Ira Goldman (October 1, 1938 – August 4, 2024) was an American philosopher who was emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.

[3] Goldman did influential work on a wide range of philosophical topics, but his principal areas of research were epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.

Goldman's accounts of knowledge and justified belief, using notions like causation and reliability instead of normative concepts like permissibility and obligation, contributed to a philosophical approach that came to be known in the 1970s as naturalized epistemology.

Goldman's view emerged initially as part of the efforts in the 1960s to find a "fourth" condition in response to the Gettier challenge to the account of knowledge as "justified true belief."

Goldman devoted significant time to showing how research in cognitive science is relevant to a variety of branches of philosophy including epistemology.