? The author wishes to acknowledge the help he has received from Mr R. S. Easterby of the Applied Psychology Department, University of Aston in Birmingham, in completing this research.

Examples growing out of the Newcomb problem have convinced many people that decision theory should proceed in terms of some kind of causal probability. I endorse this view and define and investigate a variety of causal probability. My definition is related to Skyrms' definition, but proceeds in terms of objective probabilities rather than subjective probabilities and avoids taking causal dependence as a primitive concept.

This new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology.

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

"A sequel to Pollock's How to Build a Person, this volume builds upon that theoretical groundwork for the implementation of rationality through artificial ...

Princeton University Press, 1974. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).

Now in a new edition, this exceptionally successful survey text introduces the faith, belief, and practice of Islam from its earliest origins up to its contemporary resurgence. John L. Esposito, an internationally renowned expert on Islam, traces the development of this dynamic faith and its impact on world history and politics. The fourth edition features updated and expanded coverage of Islam and politics; more extensive treatment of early Islam; an enhanced art program; a new appendix; and a free 6-month (...) subscription to Oxford Islamic Studies Online edited by John L. Esposito. (shrink)

In this chapter, we offer an account of fear and risk in anticipation of catastrophe. We draw on the narrative response to the Mount Enta volcano in medieval Sicily to frame an evaluation of how fear can be seen to impact the understanding of risk when the event of that risk is the catastrophic suffering of an entire community. We aim to demonstrate how an exploration of the philosophical questions surrounding the emotion of fear and the understanding of risk can (...) contribute to broader, interdisciplinary dialogue on the experience of the disastrous and deadly. (shrink)

This third edition, now available in paperback, is a follow up to the author's classic Boolean-Valued Models and Independence Proofs in Set Theory. It provides an exposition of some of the most important results in set theory obtained in the 20th century: the independence of the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice.

There was a long tradition in philosophy according to which good reasoning had to be deductively valid. However, that tradition began to be questioned in the 1960’s, and is now thoroughly discredited. What caused its downfall was the recognition that many familiar kinds of reasoning are not deductively valid, but clearly confer justification on their conclusions. Here are some simple examples.

This exceptionally successful survey text introduces the teachings and practice of Islam from its earliest origins up to its contemporary practice. John L. Esposito, an internationally renowned expert on Islam, traces the development of Islam and its impact on world history and politics.Lucidly written and expansive in scope, Islam: The Straight Path, Updated Fifth Edition, provides keen insight into one of the world's least understood religions. It is ideally suited for use in courses on Islam, world religions, comparative religions, (...) and Middle East history and culture.A FREE 6-month subscription to Oxford Islamic Studies Online, edited by John L. Esposito, is included with the purchase of every new copy of this text. (shrink)

In this book Pollock deals with the subject of probabilistic reasoning, making general philosophical sense of objective probabilities and exploring their ...

The usual meaning of the word continuous is “unbroken” or “uninterrupted”: thus a continuous entity —a continuum—has no “gaps.” We commonly suppose that space and time are continuous, and certain philosophers have maintained that all natural processes occur continuously: witness, for example, Leibniz's famous apothegm natura non facit saltus—“nature makes no jump.” In mathematics the word is used in the same general sense, but has had to be furnished with increasingly precise definitions. So, for instance, in the later 18th century (...) continuity of a function was taken to mean that infinitesimal changes in the value of the argument induced infinitesimal changes in the value of the function. With the abandonment of infinitesimals in the 19th century this definition came to be replaced by one employing the more precise concept of limit. (shrink)

Pollock describes an exciting theory of rationality and its partial implementation in OSCAR, a computer system whose descendants will literally be persons.

Princeton University Press, 984. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (3.9 MB).

This exceptionally successful survey text introduces the teachings and practice of Islam from its earliest origins up to its contemporary practice. John L. Esposito, an internationally renowned expert on Islam, traces the development of Islam and its impact on world history and politics.Lucidly written and expansive in scope, Islam: The Straight Path, Fifth Edition, provides keen insight into one of the world's least understood religions. It is ideally suited for use in courses on Islam, world religions, comparative religions, and (...) Middle East history and culture.A FREE 6-month subscription to Oxford Islamic Studies Online, edited by John L. Esposito, is included with the purchase of every new copy of this text. (shrink)

This Element is an exposition of second- and higher-order logic and type theory. It begins with a presentation of the syntax and semantics of classical second-order logic, pointing up the contrasts with first-order logic. This leads to a discussion of higher-order logic based on the concept of a type. The second Section contains an account of the origins and nature of type theory, and its relationship to set theory. Section 3 introduces Local Set Theory, an important form of type theory (...) based on intuitionistic logic. In Section 4 number of contemporary forms of type theory are described, all of which are based on the so-called 'doctrine of propositions as types'. We conclude with an Appendix in which the semantics for Local Set Theory - based on category theory - is outlined. (shrink)

Pollock argues that theories of ideal rationality are largely irrelevant to the decision making of real agents. Thinking about Acting aims to provide a theory of "real rationality.".

Presenting an analytical and critical study of the contemporary adult educator, Paulo Freire, this book deals with all aspects of his thought, placing at the centre of consideration his educational philosophy.

The principle of set theory known as the Axiom of Choice has been hailed as “probably the most interesting and, in spite of its late appearance, the most discussed axiom of mathematics, second only to Euclid's axiom of parallels which was introduced more than two thousand years ago” (Fraenkel, Bar-Hillel & Levy 1973, §II.4). The fulsomeness of this description might lead those unfamiliar with the axiom to expect it to be as startling as, say, the Principle of the Constancy of (...) the Velocity of Light or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. But in fact the Axiom of Choice as it is usually stated appears humdrum, even self-evident. For it amounts to nothing more than the claim that, given any collection of mutually disjoint nonempty sets, it is possible to assemble a new set — a transversal or choice set — containing exactly one element from each member of the given collection. Nevertheless, this seemingly innocuous principle has far-reaching mathematical consequences — many indispensable, some startling — and has come to figure prominently in discussions on the foundations of mathematics. It (or its equivalents) have been employed in countless mathematical papers, and a number of monographs have been exclusively devoted to it. (shrink)

Logical Options introduces the extensions and alternatives to classical logic which are most discussed in the philosophical literature: many-sorted logic, second-order logic, modal logics, intuitionistic logic, three-valued logic, fuzzy logic, and free logic. Each logic is introduced with a brief description of some aspect of its philosophical significance, and wherever possible semantic and proof methods are employed to facilitate comparison of the various systems. The book is designed to be useful for philosophy students and professional philosophers who have learned some (...) classical first-order logic and would like to learn about other logics important to their philosophical work. (shrink)

5.5. Every topos is linguistic: the equivalence theorem.

The objective of this book is to produce a theory of rational decision making for realistically resource-bounded agents. My interest is not in “What should I do if I were an ideal agent?”, but rather, “What should I do given that I am who I am, with all my actual cognitive limitations?” The book has three parts. Part One addresses the question of where the values come from that agents use in rational decision making. The most comon view among philosophers (...) is that they are based on preferences, but I argue that this is computationally impossible. I propose an alternative theory somewhat reminiscent of Bentham, and explore how human beings actually arrive at values and how they use them in decision making. Part Two investigates the knowledge of probability that is required for decision-theoretic reasoning. I argue that subjective probability makes no sense as applied to realistic agents. I sketch a theory of objective probability to put in its place. Then I use that to define a variety of causal probability and argue that this is the kind of probability presupposed by rational decision making. So what is to be defended is a variety of causal decision theory. Part Three explores how these values and probabilities are to be used in decision making. In chapter eight, it is argued first that actions cannot be evaluated in terms of their expected values as ordinarily defined, because that does not take account of the fact that a cognizer may be unable to perform an action, and may even be unable to try to perform it. An alternative notion of “expected utility” is defined to be used in place of expected values. In chapter nine it is argued that individual actions cannot be the proper objects of decision-theoretic evaluation. We must instead choose plans, and select actions indirectly on the grounds that they are prescribed by the plans we adopt. However, our objective cannot be to find plans with maximal expected utilities. Plans cannot be meaningfully compared in that way. (shrink)

Legal decision-support systems have the potential to improve access to justice, administrative efficiency, and judicial consistency, but broad adoption of such systems is contingent on development of technologies with low knowledge-engineering, validation, and maintenance costs. This paper describes two approaches to an important form of legal decision support—explainable outcome prediction—that obviate both annotation of an entire decision corpus and manual processing of new cases. The first approach, which uses an attention network for prediction and attention weights to highlight salient case (...) text, was shown to be capable of predicting decisions, but attention-weight-based text highlighting did not demonstrably improve human decision speed or accuracy in an evaluation with 61 human subjects. The second approach, termed semi-supervised case annotation for legal explanations, exploits structural and semantic regularities in case corpora to identify textual patterns that have both predictable relationships to case decisions and explanatory value. (shrink)

"There is no attempt here to lay down as inviolable or to legislate certain ways of looking at things or ways of proceeding for philosophers of religion, only proposals for how to deal with a range of basic issues-proposals that I hope will ignite much fruitful discussion and which, in any case, I shall take as a basis for my own ongoing work in the field."-from the Preface Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, (...) J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of religious and irreligious belief, the varieties of religious skepticism, and the nature of religion itself. From the author's searching analysis of faith emerges a novel understanding of propositional faith as requiring the absence of belief. Schellenberg asks what the aims of the field should be, setting out a series of principles for carrying out some of the most important of these aims. His account of justification considers not only belief but also other responses to religious claims and distinguishes the justification of responses, propositions, and persons. Throughout Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, Schellenberg is laying the groundwork for an elaboration of his own vision while at the same time suggesting how philosophers might rethink assumptions guiding most of today's work in analytic philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Much social theory takes for granted the core conceit of modern culture, that modern actors-individuals, organizations, nation states-are autochthonous and natural entities, no longer really embedded in culture. Accordingly, while there is much abstract metatheory about "actors" and their "agency," there is arguably little theory about the topic. This article offers direct arguments about how the modern (European, now global) cultural system constructs the modern actor as an authorized agent for various interests via an ongoing relocation into society of agency (...) originally located in transcendental authority or in natural forces environing the social system. We see this authorized agentic capability as an essential feature of what modern theory and culture call an "actor," and one that, when analyzed, helps greatly in explaining a number of otherwise anomalous or little analyzed features of modern individuals, organizations, and states. These features include their isomorphism and standardization, their internal decoupling, their extraordinarily complex structuration, and their capacity for prolific collective action. (shrink)

Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e— the cause and its effect— both occur, (...) but: had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. From this starting point ideas proliferate in a vast profusion. But the remarkable disparity among these ideas should not obscure their common foundation. Neither should the diversity of opinion about the prospects for a philosophical analysis of causation obscure their importance. For even those philosophers who see these prospects as dim—perhaps because they suffer post-Quinean queasiness at the thought of any analysis of any concept of interest—can often be heard to say such things as that causal relations among events are somehow “a matter of” the patterns of counterfactual dependence to be found in them. (shrink)

Princeton University Press, 1982. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).

The centrality of the whole/part relation in mathematics is demonstrated through the presentation and analysis of examples from algebra, geometry, functional analysis,logic, topology and category theory.

IN THEIR WELL-KNOWN PAPER, Kochen and Specker (1967) introduce the concept of partial Boolean algebra (pBa) and show that certain (finitely generated) partial Boolean algebras arising in quantum theory fail to possess morphisms to any Boolean algebra (we call such pBa's intractable in the sequel). In this note we begin by discussing partial..