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  1. (1 other version)Contemporary theories of knowledge.John L. Pollock - 1986 - London: Hutchinson.
    This new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology.
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  2. Knowledge and Justification.John L. Pollock - 1974 - Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Edited by John Pollock.
    Princeton University Press, 1974. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).
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  3. Contemporary Theories of Knowledge.John Pollock - 1986 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 39 (1):131-140.
     
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  4. Defeasible Reasoning.John L. Pollock - 1987 - Cognitive Science 11 (4):481-518.
    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.
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  5.  84
    Nomic Probability and the Foundations of Induction.John L. Pollock - 1990 - New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    In this book Pollock deals with the subject of probabilistic reasoning, making general philosophical sense of objective probabilities and exploring their ...
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  6.  97
    Subjunctive reasoning.John Pollock - 1976 - Reidel. Edited by Lloyd Humberstone.
    Reidel, 1976. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (3.3 MB).
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  7.  59
    How to Build a Person: A Prolegomenon.John L. Pollock - 1989 - MIT Press.
    Pollock describes an exciting theory of rationality and its partial implementation in OSCAR, a computer system whose descendants will literally be persons.
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  8.  52
    The foundations of philosophical semantics.John L. Pollock - 1984 - Princeton University Press. Edited by Lloyd Humberstone.
    Princeton University Press, 984. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (3.9 MB).
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  9.  17
    How to reason defeasibly.John L. Pollock - 1992 - Artificial Intelligence 57 (1):1-42.
  10.  53
    Resurrecting Old-Fashioned Foundationalism.Richard Fumerton, John L. Pollock, Alvin Plantinga & Laurence BonJour - 2000 - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
    The contributions in this volume make an important effort to resurrect a rather old fashioned form of foundationalism. They defend the position that there are some beliefs that are justified, and are not themselves justified by any further beliefs. This epistemic foundationalism has been the subject of rigorous attack by a wide range of theorists in recent years, leading to the impression that foundationalism is a thing of the past. DePaul argues that it is precisely the volume and virulence of (...)
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  11.  31
    How to Build a Person: A Prolegomenon.David Israel & John Pollock - 1992 - Philosophical Review 101 (4):901.
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  12. Reliability and Justified Belief.John L. Pollock - 1984 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1):103 - 114.
    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.
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  13. Epistemic norms.John L. Pollock - 1987 - Synthese 71 (1):61 - 95.
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  14.  13
    Justification and defeat.John L. Pollock - 1994 - Artificial Intelligence 67 (2):377-407.
  15.  58
    Language and thought.John L. Pollock - 1982 - Princeton University Press. Edited by Lloyd Humberstone.
    Princeton University Press, 1982. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).
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  16.  73
    ``Defeasible Reasoning with Variable Degrees of Justification".John L. Pollock - 2001 - Artificial Intelligence 133 (1-2):233-282.
    The question addressed in this paper is how the degree of justification of a belief is determined. A conclusion may be supported by several different arguments, the arguments typically being defeasible, and there may also be arguments of varying strengths for defeaters for some of the supporting arguments. What is sought is a way of computing the “on sum” degree of justification of a conclusion in terms of the degrees of justification of all relevant premises and the strengths of all (...)
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  17.  67
    How do you maximize expectation value?John L. Pollock - 1983 - Noûs 17 (3):409-421.
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  18.  15
    (2 other versions)Epistemology and Probability.John L. Pollock - 1983 - Noûs 17 (1):65.
    Probability is sometimes regarded as a universal panacea for epistemology. It has been supposed that the rationality of belief is almost entirely a matter of probabilities. Unfortunately, those philosophers who have thought about this most extensively have tended to be probability theorists first, and epistemologists only secondarily. In my estimation, this has tended to make them insensitive to the complexities exhibited by epistemic justification. In this paper I propose to turn the tables. I begin by laying out some rather simple (...)
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  19. (1 other version)The paradox of the preface.John L. Pollock - 1986 - Philosophy of Science 53 (2):246-258.
    In a number of recent papers I have been developing the theory of "nomic probability," which is supposed to be the kind of probability involved in statistical laws of nature. One of the main principles of this theory is an acceptance rule explicitly designed to handle the lottery paradox. This paper shows that the rule can also handle the paradox of the preface. The solution proceeds in part by pointing out a surprising connection between the paradox of the preface and (...)
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  20.  32
    ``A Plethora of Epistemological Theories".John Pollock - 1979 - In George Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge: New Studies in Epistemology. Boston: D. Reidel. pp. 93-115.
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  21. A refined theory of counterfactuals.John L. Pollock - 1981 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 10 (2):239 - 266.
  22. (1 other version)Vision, knowledge, and the mystery link.John L. Pollock & Iris Oved - 2005 - Noûs 39 (1):309-351.
    Imagine yourself sitting on your front porch, sipping your morning coffee and admiring the scene before you. You see trees, houses, people, automobiles; you see a cat running across the road, and a bee buzzing among the flowers. You see that the flowers are yellow, and blowing in the wind. You see that the people are moving about, many of them on bicycles. You see that the houses are painted different colors, mostly earth tones, and most are one-story but a (...)
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  23. The Chimerical Appeal of Epistemic Externalism.Joe Cruz & John Pollock - 2004 - In Richard Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge. De Gruyter. pp. 125--42.
    Internalism in epistemology is the view that all the factors relevant to the justification of a belief are importantly internal to the believer, while externalism is the view that at least some of those factors are external. This extremely modest first approximation cries out for refinement (which we undertake below), but is enough to orient us in the right direction, namely that the debate between internalism and externalism is bound up with the controversy over the correct account of the distinction (...)
     
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  24.  93
    Criteria and our knowledge of the material world.John L. Pollock - 1967 - Philosophical Review 76 (1):28-60.
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  25. Self-defeating arguments.John L. Pollock - 1991 - Minds and Machines 1 (4):367-392.
    An argument is self-defeating when it contains defeaters for some of its own defeasible lines. It is shown that the obvious rules for defeat among arguments do not handle self-defeating arguments correctly. It turns out that they constitute a pervasive phenomenon that threatens to cripple defeasible reasoning, leading to almost all defeasible reasoning being defeated by unexpected interactions with self-defeating arguments. This leads to some important changes in the general theory of defeasible reasoning.
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  26. Belief revision and epistemology.John Pollock & Anthony Gillies - 2000 - Synthese 122 (1-2):69-92.
    Postulational approaches attempt to understand the dynamics of belief revision by appealing to no more than the set of beliefs held by an agent and the logical relations between them. It is argued there that such an approach cannot work. A proper account of belief revision must also appeal to the arguments supporting beliefs, and recognize that those arguments can be defeasible. If we begin with a mature epistemological theory that accommodates this, it can be seen that the belief revision (...)
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  27.  50
    Rational Choice and Action Omnipotence.John L. Pollock - 2002 - Philosophical Review 111 (1):1.
    A theory of rational choice is a theory of how an agent should, rationally, go about deciding what actions to perform at any given time. For example, I may want to decide whether to go to a movie this evening or stay home and read a book. The actions between which we want to choose are perfectly ordinary actions, and the presumption is that to make such a decision we should attend to the likely consequences of our decision. It is (...)
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  28. The 'possible worlds' analysis of counterfactuals.John L. Pollock - 1976 - Philosophical Studies 29 (6):469 - 476.
  29. Perceptual knowledge.John L. Pollock - 1971 - Philosophical Review 80 (3):287-319.
  30. (1 other version)Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method.Donald Gillies, Robert Cummins & John Pollock - 1997 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (4):610-612.
     
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  31. A recursive semantics for defeasible reasoning.John Pollock - unknown
    One of the most striking characteristics of human beings is their ability to function successfully in complex environments about which they know very little. In light of our pervasive ignorance, we cannot get around in the world just reasoning deductively from our prior beliefs together with new perceptual input. As our conclusions are not guaranteed to be true, we must countenance the possibility that new information will lead us to change our minds, withdrawing previously adopted beliefs. In this sense, our (...)
     
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  32.  63
    Perceiving and reasoning about a changing world.John Pollock - unknown
    A rational agent (artificial or otherwise) residing in a complex changing environment must gather information perceptually, update that information as the world changes, and combine that information with causal information to reason about the changing world. Using the system of defeasible reasoning that is incorporated into the OSCAR architecture for rational agents, a set of reasonschemas is proposed for enabling an agent to perform some of the requisite reasoning. Along the way, solutions are proposed for the Frame Problem, the Qualification (...)
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  33.  59
    A theory of direct inference.John L. Pollock - 1983 - Theory and Decision 15 (1):29-95.
  34.  40
    Four Kinds of Conditionals.John L. Pollock - 1975 - American Philosophical Quarterly 12 (1):51 - 59.
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  35.  87
    New foundations for practical reasoning.John L. Pollock - 1992 - Minds and Machines 2 (2):113-144.
    Practical reasoning aims at deciding what actions to perform in light of the goals a rational agent possesses. This has been a topic of interest in both philosophy and artificial intelligence, but these two disciplines have produced very different models of practical reasoning. The purpose of this paper is to examine each model in light of the other and produce a unified model adequate for the purposes of both disciplines and superior to the standard models employed by either.The philosophical (decision-theoretic) (...)
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  36.  11
    (1 other version)The logical foundations of goal-regression planning in autonomous agents.John L. Pollock - 1998 - Artificial Intelligence 106 (2):267-334.
  37.  11
    VI. Formal Semantics.John L. Pollock - 1984 - In The foundations of philosophical semantics. Princeton University Press. pp. 172-229.
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  38.  36
    Thinking about an Object.John L. Pollock - 1980 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5 (1):487-500.
  39.  93
    A solution to the problem of induction.John L. Pollock - 1984 - Noûs 18 (3):423-461.
  40. Causal probability.John L. Pollock - 2002 - Synthese 132 (1-2):143 - 185.
    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.
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  41. Nomic probability.John L. Pollock - 1984 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 9 (1):177-204.
  42. What am I? Virtual machines and the mind/body problem.John L. Pollock - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (2):237–309.
    When your word processor or email program is running on your computer, this creates a "virtual machine” that manipulates windows, files, text, etc. What is this virtual machine, and what are the virtual objects it manipulates? Many standard arguments in the philosophy of mind have exact analogues for virtual machines and virtual objects, but we do not want to draw the wild metaphysical conclusions that have sometimes tempted philosophers in the philosophy of mind. A computer file is not made of (...)
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  43.  22
    Introduction to symbolic logic.John L. Pollock - 1969 - New York,: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
  44. Interest driven suppositional reasoning.John Pollock - manuscript
    The aim of this paper is to investigate two related aspects of human reasoning, and use the results to construct an automated theorem prover for the predicate calculus that at least approximately models human reasoning. The result is a non-resolution theorem prover that does not use Skolemization. It involves two central ideas. One is the interest constraints that are of central importance in guiding human reasoning. The other is the notion of suppositional reasoning, wherein one makes a supposition, draws inferences (...)
     
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  45. Plans And Decisions.John L. Pollock - 2004 - Theory and Decision 57 (2):79-107.
    Counterexamples are constructed for classical decision theory, turning on the fact that actions must often be chosen in groups rather than individually, i.e., the objects of rational choice are plans. It is argued that there is no way to define optimality for plans that makes the finding of optimal plans the desideratum of rational decision-making. An alternative called “locally global planning” is proposed as a replacement for classical decision theory. Decision-making becomes a non-terminating process without a precise target rather than (...)
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  46.  83
    A theory of moral reasoning.John L. Pollock - 1986 - Ethics 96 (3):506-523.
  47.  64
    Foundations for direct inference.John L. Pollock - 1994 - Theory and Decision 17 (3):221-255.
  48.  22
    How to build a person: The physical basis for mentality.John L. Pollock - 1987 - Philosophical Perspectives 1:109-154.
  49. (1 other version)Irrationality and cognition.John L. Pollock - 2008 - In Quentin Smith (ed.), Epistemology: new essays. New York : Oxford University Press,: Oxford University Press.
    The strategy of this paper is to throw light on rational cognition and epistemic justification by examining irrationality. Epistemic irrationality is possible because we are reflexive cognizers, able to reason about and redirect some aspects of our own cognition. One consequence of this is that one cannot give a theory of epistemic rationality or epistemic justification without simultaneously giving a theory of practical rationality. A further consequence is that practical irrationality can affect our epistemic cognition. I argue that practical irrationality (...)
     
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  50. Procedural epistemology.John Pollock - 1998 - In Terrell Ward Bynum & James Moor (eds.), The Digital Phoenix: How Computers are Changing Philosophy. Cambridge: Blackwell. pp. 17.
     
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