Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

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

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

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

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 (...) relevant reasons. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 14-20, March‐April 2022.

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 chapter traces the historical and conceptual development of the idea of the continuum and the allied concept of real number. Particular attention is paid to the idea of infinitesimal, which played a key role in the development of the calculus during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which has undergone a revival in the later twentieth century.

Some proponents of the preservation of American wildemess-for example, Aldo Leopold-have argued in terms of the role of wildemess in forming and maintaining a set of distinctive national character traits. l examine and defend the value judgment implicit in Leopold’s argument. The value of one's cultural heritage is, I contend, as important and valid as other familiar goods appealed to in defense of social policy.

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.

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

As a preliminary to the modern theory of measurement with which this paper is chiefly concerned, it is desirable to review a few of the characteristics and implications of classical physics to illustrate the far reaching changes that have taken place in our conception of nature as the result of the development of quantum mechanics.

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)

It has long been claimed that Homo sapiens is the only species that has language, but only recently has it been recognized that humans also have an unusual pattern of growth and development. Social mammals have two stages of pre-adult development: infancy and juvenility. Humans have two additional prolonged and pronounced life history stages: childhood, an interval of four years extending between infancy and the juvenile period that follows, and adolescence, a stage of about eight years that stretches from juvenility (...) to adulthood. We begin by reviewing the primary biological and linguistic changes occurring in each of the four pre-adult ontogenetic stages in human life history. Then we attempt to trace the evolution of childhood and juvenility in our hominin ancestors. We propose that several different forms of selection applied in infancy and childhood; and that, in adolescence, elaborated vocal behaviors played a role in courtship and intrasexual competition, enhancing fitness and ultimately integrating performative and pragmatic skills with linguistic knowledge in a broad faculty of language. A theoretical consequence of our proposal is that fossil evidence of the uniquely human stages may be used, with other findings, to date the emergence of language. If important aspects of language cannot appear until sexual maturity, as we propose, then a second consequence is that the development of language requires the whole of modern human ontogeny. Our life history model thus offers new ways of investigating, and thinking about, the evolution, development, and ultimately the nature of human language. (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)

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

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) (...) model directs activity by evaluating acts one at a time in terms of their expected utilities. It is argued that, except in certain special cases, this constitutes an inadequate theory of practical reasoning leading to intuitively incorrect action prescriptions. Acts must be viewed as parts of plans, and plans evaluated as coherent units rather than piecemenal in terms of the acts comprising them. Rationality dictates choosing acts by first choosing the plans prescribing them. Plans, in turn, are compared by looking at their expected values. However, because plans can be embedded in one another, we cannot select plans just by maximizing expected values. Instead, we must employ a more complex criterion here named coextendability. (shrink)

is a presentation of mathematics in terms of the fundamental concepts of transformation, and composition of transformations. While the importance of these concepts had long been recognized in algebra (for example, by Galois through the idea of a group of permutations) and in geometry (for example, by Klein in his Erlanger Programm), the truly universal role they play in mathematics did not really begin to be appreciated until the rise of abstract algebra in the 1930s. In abstract algebra the idea (...) of transformation of structure (homomorphism) was central from the beginning, and it soon became apparent to algebraists that its most important concepts and constructions were in fact formulable in terms of that idea alone. Thus emerged the view that the essence of a mathematical structure is to be sought not in its internal constitution, but rather in the nature of its relationships with other structures of the same kind, as manifested through the network of transformations. This idea has achieved its fullest expression in category theory, an axiomatic framework within which the notions of transformation (as morphism or arrow) and composition (and also structure, as object) are fundamental, that is, are not defined in terms of anything else. (shrink)

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 (...) and uncontroversial features of the structure of epistemic justification, and then go on to ask what we can conclude about the connection between epistemology and probability in the light of those features. My conclusion is that probability plays no central role in epistemology. This is not to say that probability plays no role at all. In the course of the investigation, I defend a pair of probabilistic acceptance rules which enable us, under some circumstances, to arrive at justified belief on the basis of high probability. But these rules are of quite limited scope. The effect of there being such rules is merely that probability provides one source for justified belief, on a par with perception, memory, etc. There is no way probability can provide a universal cure for all our epistemological ills. (shrink)

Falk claims that human language took a step forward when infants lost their ability to cling and were placed on the ground, increasing their fears, which mothers assuaged prosodically. This claim, which is unsupported by anthropological and psychological evidence, would have done little for the syllabic and segmental structure of language, and ignores infants' own contribution to the process.

This book explores and articulates the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal from two points of view: the philosophical and the mathematical. The first section covers the history of these ideas in philosophy. Chapter one, entitled ‘The continuous and the discrete in Ancient Greece, the Orient and the European Middle Ages,’ reviews the work of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and other Ancient Greeks; the elements of early Chinese, Indian and Islamic thought; and early Europeans including Henry of Harclay, Nicholas of (...) Autrecourt, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine and Nicolas Oreme. The second chapter of the book covers European thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Arnauld, Fermat, and more. Chapter three, 'The age of continuity,’ discusses eighteenth century mathematicians including Euler and Carnot, and philosophers, among them Hume, Kant and Hegel. Examining the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourth chapter describes the reduction of the continuous to the discrete, citing the contributions of Bolzano, Cauchy and Reimann. Part one of the book concludes with a chapter on divergent conceptions of the continuum, with the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers and mathematicians, including Veronese, Poincaré, Brouwer, and Weyl. Part two of this book covers contemporary mathematics, discussing topology and manifolds, categories, and functors, Grothendieck topologies, sheaves, and elementary topoi. Among the theories presented in detail are non-standard analysis, constructive and intuitionist analysis, and smooth infinitesimal analysis/synthetic differential geometry. No other book so thoroughly covers the history and development of the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal. (shrink)

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 (...) the gambler's fallacy. (shrink)

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)

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.

Epistemology is about how we can know the various things we claim to know. Epistemology is driven by attempts to answer the question, “How do you know?” This gives rise to investigations on several different levels. At the lowest level, philosophers investigate particular kinds of knowledge claims. Thus we find theories of perceptual knowledge (“How do you know the things you claim to know directly on the basis of perception?”), theories of induction and abduction (“How do you know the general (...) truths you infer from observation of particular cases?”), theories of our knowledge of other minds, theories of mathematical knowledge, and so forth. At an intermediate level, topics are investigated that pertain to all or most of the specific kinds of knowledge discussed at the lowest level. Theories of reasoning, both deductive and defeasible, occur at this level. At the highest level we find general epistemological theories that attempt to explain how knowledge in general is possible. At this level we encounter versions of foundationalism, coherentism, probabilism, reliabilism, and direct realism. One can be doing epistemology by working at any of these levels. The levels cannot be isolated from each other, however. Work at any level tends to presuppose something about the other levels. For example, work on inductive reasoning at least presupposes that reasoning plays a role in the acquisition or justification of beliefs and normally presupposes something about the structure of defeasible reasoning. (shrink)

John Wilson's work as moral educator is summarized and evaluated. His rationalist humanistic approach is based on a componential characterization of the morally educated person. Such a person consistently manifests a unity of reflection, feeling, belief, and acting under the logically structured rubrics of PHIL, EMP, GIG and KRAT, and exemplifying the formal features of 'moral opinion'. The rationale and conceptual status of the components is discussed, as is the view that the concept of education entails that teachers be (...) moral educators. This involves cultivating autonomous rationality with respect to the unconscious, motivation, day-to-day moral decision-making, and the emotions; in the latter case there are extensive applications in religious education. Finally, certain weaknesses and pre-eminent strengths of Wilson's position are indicated, and comparisons briefly made with the views of McPhail, Peters, Frankena and Kohlberg. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that significant potential for psychological growth and self-learning exists in independent foreign travel characterized by long periods of movement under challenging conditions and combined with intense cross-cultural contact. I call this style of travel autonomous cross-cultural hardship travel (ACHT). A number of studies regarding the personal effects of travel and cross-cultural contact are reviewed. The relevance of humanistic psychology and transformative learning (TL) theory is also considered. I propose that the psychological benefits of ACHT are (...) found in its capacity to promote a “deepened sense of self” that is paradoxical, emergent, and universal. (shrink)

John Bintliff et alii Le Tanagra Project : recherches dans une cité antique de Béotie et son territoire (2000-2002) p.541-606 Cet article présente les résultats préliminaires du Leiden-Ljubljana Field Project dans la cité antique de Tanagra, en Béotie orientale, et dans ses environs immédiats. Les travaux ont débuté en 1999, avec une vaste équipe de chercheurs et d'étudiants des Pays-Bas, de Belgique, de Slovénie et de Grèce, sous la direction de John Bintliff et Bozidar Slapsak et la sous-direction (...) de Kostas Sbonias. Les différents spécialistes présentent ici leur travail en détail, développant les rapports des deux premières campagnes publiés dans Pharos, le périodique annuel de l'Institut néerlandais d'Athènes. (shrink)

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary.