I'm not letting that pass.  Whether or not he deigned to cite my immortal work Judgement and Justification (or, at a minimum, Larry Sklar's "Methodological Conservatism"), Goldman should at least have acknowledged that the position he takes against the pragmatic virtues is controversial and that the opposing side has been (ahem) impressively defended.  He does cite Harman on conservatism, but only to dismiss him with a one-sentence objection.
     More generally, the view Goldman is rejecting without mentioning it by name is explanatory coherentism or "explanationism," defended by Quine, Quine & Ullian, Sellars, Harman, me, Paul Thagard and Peter Lipton among others.  (On which, see again my "Explanation and Epistemology.")  That view is centered on the notion of a "best explanation":  A nonbasic belief is justified when it is part of the best overall explanatory account of some range of phenomena--where the good-making features of an explanation are taken to be the pragmatic virtues.  Besides the three mentioned by Goldman, there are testability, fecundity, neatness, and doubtless others.

     I might as well begin by addressing Goldman's one-sentence objection to conservatism, the wishful thinking example on p. 38.  There are two subcases which it is important not to conflate: (W1) the wishful thinker holds her/his wishful belief contrary to evidence; (W2) s/he holds the belief in the absence of relevant evidence.
     (W1) is beside the point.  The pragmatic virtues are always and everywhere "other things being equal" desiderata; they do not (usually) counteract evidence.<1>  In particular, an explanationist who accepts conservatism as a virtue does not claim that conservatism justifies a belief in the face of contrary evidence.
    In (W2), the subject finds her-/himself holding a belief without having any particular evidence either for or against it.  Here the explanationist conservative does maintain that the belief is justified at least in the sense of being permissible, if only because of the cognitive cost of rejecting it and making the attendant revisions in one's surrounding belief system.  (I shall reprise some motivation for that view below.)  So the conservative is not and should not be impressed by Goldman's bare assertion to the contrary.

     Generality: I myself have no big axe to grind here, but for the record I agree with Clea that a preference for generality of hypothesis does play some role in "the prosaic purposes of everyday life" and is not proprietary to the official sciences.  As Goldman himself puts it (p. 38), "[i]f more can be explained with less, so much the better."  I myself think "generality" is just a special case of simplicity.
     But note again that Goldman's specific objection, that "finding...[true] generalizations is not always more important to us than finding truths about particulars," is an ignoratio elenchi.  To my knowledge, no human being has ever held that finding true generalizations is always more important to us than finding truths about particulars.  Rather, we prefer more general to less general hypotheses, other things being equal (which other things almost never are).

     Simplicity:  Goldman is right that "simplicity means different things to different theorists and no widely accepted analysis of simplicity has yet been found" (but see Elliott Sober's Simplicity, Oxford U.P., 1975).  Simplicity is many-faceted, or rather relative to a profusion of respects; a theory may be simple in some various ways and complex in others.  But Goldman insists that simplicity (at all) "should not be inserted into the pantheon of values for cognition in general."
     Har.  It would be amusing to see us try to get along without appeal to simplicity (however tacit).  Explanatory inference is hardly limited to science.  A detective solves a murder case by reflecting on the various clues and constraints and arriving at the best explanation of the clues given the constraints, the story that makes the best sense of the clues.  An auto mechanic diagnoses your car trouble by inferring the best explanation of the car’s symptoms.  It may be tempting in such cases to say that the detective or the mechanic has arrived at the "only possible" explanation and therefore has really performed a deduction, by ruling out all the alternate possibilities (Sherlock Holmes talked explicitly in this way).  But that would not be accurate.  There are always many possibilities that have not been logically ruled out by the evidence, but are just poor or outright fanciful explanations:  The murder might have been committed by a very small paratrooper who landed silently in pre-dawn darkness on the garage roof and had some way of getting through the window without breaking it, etc.  Or it might have been committed by invisible aliens.  Or it might have been overdetermined: the ordinary human murderer might have been accompanied by a Venusian superbeing who simultaneously projected deadly thought waves to stop the victim's heart. "The only possible explanation" has to mean just "the only even halfway plausible explanation," and without exception, plausibility is determined in part by simplicity.  Only Occam's Razor rules out the Venusian supernumerary.
    Nor is explanatory inference limited to professional practitioners such as detectives and mechanics.  We all perform it in everyday life as well.  I find what appear to be droppings on my lawn, and infer that an unleashed animal has been by.  The last slice of pizza has unexpectedly disappeared from the refrigerator, and I infer that my daughter has stopped at home after school instead of proceeding directly to her orchestra rehearsal.  Some philosophers, notably Russell and Quine, argue that our constant flood of beliefs about ordinary physical objects in our environment is the result of constant explanatory inference from the ways we are appeared to.

     There is a general worry about the pragmatic virtues, voiced very eloquently by Bas van Fraassen (in The Scientific Image, Oxford: U.P., 1980):  Aren't the explanatory virtues’ pragmatic value just a mixture of corner-cutting convenience--really a form of epistemic laziness--and merely aesthetic appeal?  In curve-fitting, for example, we prefer the smoothest hypothesis because the smooth curve both is easier to draw and looks prettier.  But why should anyone think that convenience and prettiness count in any way toward truth?  Why should a theory’s being simpler than another theory make the first theory more likely to be true, to match reality?  (The Grecian Urn’s motto, that beauty and truth are one, was just Keats running romantically out of control.)
     And a related objection, raised by Ian Hacking ("Experimentation and Scientific Realism," Philosophical Topics 13: 71-88):  Truth is a relation between a theory or hypothesis and the world.  But the pragmatic virtues are relations between theories and our human minds, to which relations the world seems irrelevant. The virtues have to do with the roles that hypotheses play in our private cognitive economies, not with anything external to us.  They are (in Hacking’s phrase) only what make our minds feel good.  The point is no longer just to ask rhetorically why making our minds feel good should be taken to be a warrant of truth; it is that the virtues are positively the wrong sort of properties to be so taken.  (This second argument is most compelling for the case of conservativism.  That a hypothesis fits comfortably with what we already believe makes that hypothesis pleasant and attractive to us, but, one might well think, hardly justifies it.)
     Goldman does not voice either of these general objections, but I suspect he is sympathetic.  In any case, the two are answered both in my book and in "Explanation and Epistemology."

     I still owe you some motivation for awarding specifically epistemic value to the pragmatic virtues.  I'll just paste it in from "E&E":
    There is an idea, emphasized by Reliabilists but prevalent among epistemologists more generally, that ‘truth is the goal of cognition,’ and hence that nothing should count as cognitive unless it can be shown to be truth-conducive or at least is somehow directly truth-conducive.  But it is fairly easy to see that truth cannot be the only epistemic value.  Suppose it were.  If the goal, like Descartes’, is merely to avoid falsehood, then we could reach our ultimate epistemic goal simply by confining our assent to tautologies; we would still thereby believe uncountably many truths.  If, instead, the idea is to believe all truths, the goal would be radically unreachable.  Realizing those things, the truth-centered epistemologist usually alludes to a ‘favorable balance of truth over error.’  But ‘favorable’ as regards what?  Some further value or interest must be consulted to judge what is ‘favorable,’ or the suggestion is meaningless.
    More specifically, it is hardly unreasonable to suppose with Peirce that beliefs are for something, and that cognition has a function.  Truth cannot possibly be the only goal of cognition.  There must at least be something in the way of informativeness or other usefulness, however that might be measured.  Since belief is a guide to action, a belief’s other pragmatic virtues may also contribute to its overall cognitive goodness.
    Lycan (J&J, Ch. 7) argues that the way in which the pragmatic virtues do this is precisely by making cognition efficient in guiding action.  They are the product of good design or ‘design’ by natural selection.  A hyperskilled cognitive bioengineer fitting human beings for a postPleistocene environment would, arguably, have endowed us with the same habits of hypothesis preference as line up with the pragmatic virtues.  For example, she would have built us to prefer (other things being equal, as always) simpler hypotheses to complex ones.  Simpler hypotheses are more efficient to work with.  Complexities incur greater risk of error in application.  And for that matter, simplicity is itself a form of efficiency, in that we want to achieve plenitude of result, in the way of data subsumed and results predicted, but with economy of means.  For the same sorts of reason, the engineer would program us to seek generality or explanatory power when other costs are low.
    The engineer would not want us to load up on beliefs that have little or nothing to do with our immediate interactions with our environment, unless those beliefs play an enormous unifying, simplifying and systematizing role.  Hence, she would have us prefer more readily testable hypotheses to less testable ones.
    Other things being equal, it would be more efficient for us to be able to extrapolate a type of hypothesis motivated by one subject-matter to other, not obviously related areas, so very likely the engineer would have us seek fruitfulness.  It is perhaps more obvious that she would instill an aversion to messy belief systems full of dead ends and paths that lead nowhere.  If we think of belief systems as maps or charts, clearly a neat one will allow us to find our way around our environment more surefootedly than would a messy one.  (But what if the system has been made too neat, and contains inaccuracies?  The recommendation of neatness methodologically assumes, here as always, that the system in question is unrefuted.  Notice too that even in fact, as in real-world cartography, accuracy should not always trump neatness; some error is tolerable, even mandatory, in the interest of smooth and fast action, if the particular error is unlikely to cause much trouble.)  Also, a particular belief that raises awkward questions thereby causes distraction, sapping at least some time and mental energy.
    Finally, the engineer would make us conservative, at least to the minimal extent of not revising our beliefs without some reason to do so.  Like social change, all belief revision comes at a price, drawing on energy and resources.  Arbitrary and gratuitous changes of belief, therefore, are to be avoided.  If there were a habit of making such changes, the resulting instability would be inefficient if not constantly confusing.
    Thus, from the design point of view, it seems to be a good thing that we cognize according to the pragmatic virtues--conservativeness included.  We would not function at all well unless we did so.
    (It must be emphasized that the Darwinized Peircean view sketched in the preceding few paragraphs is not an attempt at justifying appeal to the pragmatic virtues in any usual epistemic sense of ‘justify.’  The explanationist maintains that although the virtues are identified through reflective equilibrium as basic cognitive values of ours, they are, thus, basic; there is nothing that could justify them.  The function of our cognitive bioengineer story is only to rebut Hacking’s charge that they are only mind candy, not cognitive in their value.)

     A truth junkie such as Goldman or Simon might well ask, "OK, so if truth is not the goal of cognition, then what (for God's sake) is the goal of cognition?"
     Steve Stich (in The Fragmentation of Reason, not as Simon cites him Deconstructing the Mind) rejects the presupposition.  Why think that cognition has a goal at all?  At least, why think that cognition has any one single goal?  Stich maintains that the jumble of habits, methods and processes we collect under the term "cognition" is just a bag of tricks bestowed on us by natural selection (and emphatically a suboptimal one).  The various habits etc. are vitally useful, all right, but not in any one way.  They serve various purposes on various occasions, and the best an epistemologist can do is to write up a no doubt complex natural history of that.  Stich is thus a pragmatic pluralist, or pluralistic pragmatist.
     I myself am more of a monistic pragmatist.  First, in my Panglossian-Darwinian way I think the bottom-line goal of cognition is reproductive fitness (what else?).  But at the common-sense level, prescinding from biological science, the goal of cognition is effective action.  We cognize in order to get by, to do well, to pursue our own goals efficiently and successfully.  Peirce and Dewey got this exactly right.  It's the American way.
     What truth has to do with it is that true beliefs usually conduce to effective action.  (Though I don't know how anyone could demonstrate that, however natural it is to believe.)  There may be a stronger, rule-utilitarian-type point to be made: Perhaps adopting a rule, "Always pursue true beliefs no matter what," would conduce to effective action.  But so far as I can see, this instrumental type of value is the only type of value true beliefs have.  Truth is not the goal of cognition.  Effective action is.
 
 

1  Though a sufficient weight of pragmatic virtue in a theory can make us reject an apparently disconfirming observation as specious.  Recall curve-fitting in the chemistry lab.