"The Third Edition of Philosophical Foundations of Adult Education presents seven theoretical approaches to adult education: liberal, progressive, behaviorist, humanist, radical/critical, analytic, and postmodem. The book gives the historical grounding as well as the basic principles for each approach. In this edition each chapter has been revised and brought up to date. The chapter on radical adult education incorporates recent developments in radical education, phenomenology, feminist educational theory, and critical social theory. The book contains an entirely new chapter on postmodem (...) adult education.". (shrink)

Language, like other human traits, could only have evolved during one or more stages of development. We enlist the theoretical framework of human life history to account for certain aspects of linguistic evolution, with special reference to initial phases in the process. It is hypothesized that selection operated at several developmental stages, the earlier ones producing new behaviors that were reinforced by additional, and possibly more powerful, forms of selection during later stages, especially adolescence and early adulthood. Peer commentaries have (...) provided opportunities to explain human life history more comprehensively, and to add details to our account of spoken language. We made no attempt to explain syntax in the target article, but we propose here that selection for “vocal plumage” may have increased our species’ capacity for utterance complexity, a development that would have benefited all levels of language. (shrink)

Van de Vliert embraces a model of human needs, underplaying a model whereby individuals, motivated by psychological needs, develop coping strategies that help them meet their personal goals and collectively exert an influence on social and economic systems. Undesirable climates may inflate the value of financial capital, but they also boost the value of social capital.

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

An intervening gestural stage in language evolution, though seductive, is ultimately redundant, and is not necessarily supported by modern human or chimp behaviour. The findings and arguments offered from mirror neurones, anatomy, and lateralization are capable of other interpretations, and the manipulative dextrality of chimps is under-recognized. While language certainly possesses certain unique properties, its roots are ancient.

"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).

(1984). Weather foreasting and the development of meteorological theory at the Paris Observatory, 1853–1878. Annals of Science: Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 359-382.

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.

In their writings on Africa and colonialism, John and Jean Comaroff have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated?These essays work toward an "imaginative sociology," demonstrating the techniques by which (...) social science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction the authors offer their most complete statement to date on historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade. (shrink)

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

Culture influences what we attend to, encode, remember and think about. Easterners are said to attend more to the relationship between focal objects and their context while Westerners disentangle focal objects from their context. Simply put, Easterners process information holistically and Westerners analytically. Psychosocial factors, like Fear of Isolation, have been proposed as a possible mechanism for cultural differences in terms of information processing. While East vs. West cultural differences are well researched, the monolithic notion that all Westerners process information (...) analytically was questioned in the research presented below. In this paper, we present a study conducted with two Western cultures and one Eastern where we induced the chronic psychosocial factor: Fear of Isolation, and measured its influence on information processing. We found that Italian participants processed information more holistically than us Americans, and that Italians were more similar to Chinese than us Americans. (shrink)

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

The years 1850–80 saw great advances in electrical technology in France. Innovations and inventions in this field came mainly but not exclusively from the artisan/craftsman sector, with some contribution from men from a more academic science research environment. By the end of the period inventors were more likely to have undergone some formal training in science, although there were still contributions from those who had not attended courses at the Grandes Écoles or the faculties of science but had benefited from (...) lower level classes. However, from whatever sector the innovations came, they were likely to have been, at some stage, submitted to the Academy for its judgement and approval. Thus the Academy was still playing something of its pre-revolutionary role and having an influence on the pace of electrical innovation in France. (shrink)

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

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.".

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)

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

"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)

Reliabilist theories propose to analyse epistemic justification in terms of reliability. This paper argues that if we pay attention to the details of probability theory we find that there is no concept of reliability that can possibly play the role required by reliabilist theories. A distinction is drawn between the general reliability of a process and the single case reliability of an individual belief, And it is argued that neither notion can serve the reliabilist adequately.