Dorit Bar-On is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and Director of the Expression, Communication, and the Origins of Meaning (ECOM) Research Group. [1] [2] [3] Her research focuses on philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaethics. [4] She previously held positions at the University of Rochester and UNC-Chapel Hill, where she was the Zachary Smith Distinguished Term Professor of Research and Undergraduate Education from 2014 to 2015. [5]
Bar-On earned a BA at Tel Aviv University in Philosophy & Linguistics before earning her MA and PhD in Philosophy at UCLA. [6] Her dissertation, Indeterminacy of Translation: Theory and Practice, was written under the supervision of Tyler Burge, Rogers Albritton, Keith Donnellan, David Kaplan, and David Pears. Bar-On has also written Hebrew translations of poetry, fiction, and philosophy, including three anthologies in modern philosophy, writings by Iris Murdoch, Kurt Vonnegut, Dos Passos, Dorothy Richardson, E. E. Cummings, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, and, in collaboration with Marcia Falk, a collection of poems by Zelda Schneerson Mishkovsky and The Book of Blessings. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Her other professional experience includes being a radio producer, editor and broadcaster for the Israel IDF radio station, a television writer and host in Israel, and a Hebrew television newscaster and interviewer for Channel 18 in Los Angeles. [6] Bar-On also formerly served as the President of MYCO@UNC, a youth chamber organization, from 2009 to 2012. [6]
In Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge, published by Oxford University Press, Bar-On investigates the problem of self-knowledge in relation to questions of expression and expressive behavior. [14] [15] She draws on historical figures including Wittgenstein and Darwin to develop a neo-expressivist view of first-personal expressive utterances which explains how these utterances differ epistemically from non-expressive utterances while sharing the same semantic structure. [16] Speaking My Mind has been praised[ by whom? ] as "a rich book; rich in topics, in argumentation, and in philosophical imagination and insight. It deserves the attention of all who work in mind and language." [17] In subsequent work, Bar-On has applied this neo-expressivist framework to additional problems in the philosophy of language, metaethics, and epistemology. [18] [19] More recently, Bar-On has sought to illuminate the nature of human communication by situating it in relation to animal expressive communication more broadly, and thereby to show how human linguistic meaning can be understood consistently with a naturalistic theory of the world. [20] [21] [22]
In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, and meaning of moral judgment. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false. A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world". If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).
In philosophy, the brain in a vat (BIV) is a scenario used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of human conceptions of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, consciousness, and meaning. Originated by Gilbert Harman, Hilary Putnam turned the scenario into a modernized version of René Descartes's evil demon thought experiment. Following many science fiction stories, the scenario involves a mad scientist that might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer that would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those a brain normally receives. According to such stories, the computer would then be simulating reality and the "disembodied" brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences, such as those of a person with an embodied brain, without these being related to objects or events in the real world. According to Putnam, the thought of "being a brain-in-a-vat" (BIV) is either false or meaningless. Considered a cornerstone of Semantic externalism, the argument produced significant literature. The Matrix franchise and other fictional works (below) are considered inspired by Putnam's argument.
Robert Boyce Brandom is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both systematic and historical interests in these topics. His work has presented "arguably the first fully systematic and technically rigorous attempt to explain the meaning of linguistic items in terms of their socially norm-governed use, thereby also giving a non-representationalist account of the intentionality of thought and the rationality of action as well."
The concept of illocutionary acts was introduced into linguistics by the philosopher J. L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. In his framework, locution is what was said and meant, illocution is what was done, and perlocution is what happened as a result.
Contextualism, also known as epistemic contextualism, is a family of views in philosophy which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs. Proponents of contextualism argue that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context. Contextualist views hold that philosophically controversial concepts, such as "meaning P", "knowing that P", "having a reason to A", and possibly even "being true" or "being right" only have meaning relative to a specified context. Other philosophers contend that context-dependence leads to complete relativism.
Performativity is the concept that language can function as a form of social action and have the effect of change. The concept has multiple applications in diverse fields such as anthropology, social and cultural geography, economics, gender studies, law, linguistics, performance studies, history, management studies and philosophy.
In philosophy, transcendence is the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning, of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages. It includes philosophies, systems, and approaches that describe the fundamental structures of being, not as an ontology, but as the framework of emergence and validation of knowledge of being. These definitions are generally grounded in reason and empirical observation and seek to provide a framework for understanding the world that is not reliant on religious beliefs or supernatural forces. "Transcendental" is a word derived from the scholastic, designating the extra-categorical attributes of beings.
In meta-ethics, expressivism is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms – for example, "It is wrong to torture an innocent human being" – are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as "wrong", "good", or "just" do not refer to real, in-the-world properties. The primary function of moral sentences, according to expressivism, is not to assert any matter of fact but rather to express an evaluative attitude toward an object of evaluation. Because the function of moral language is non-descriptive, moral sentences do not have any truth conditions. Hence, expressivists either do not allow that moral sentences to have truth value, or rely on a notion of truth that does not appeal to any descriptive truth conditions being met for moral sentences.
This glossary of philosophy is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to philosophy and related disciplines, including logic, ethics, and theology.
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions by being critical and generally systematic and by its reliance on rational argument. It involves logical analysis of language and clarification of the meaning of words and concepts.
Metaepistemology is the branch of epistemology and metaphilosophy that studies the underlying assumptions made in debates in epistemology, including those concerning the existence and authority of epistemic facts and reasons, the nature and aim of epistemology, and the methodology of epistemology.
A writing process is a set of mental and physical steps that someone takes to create any type of text. Almost always, these activities require inscription equipment, either digital or physical: chisels, pencils, brushes, chalk, dyes, keyboards, touchscreens, etc.; each of these tools has unique affordances that influence writers' workflows. Writing processes are very individualized and task-specific; they frequently incorporate activities such as talking, drawing, reading, browsing, and other activities that are not typically associated with writing.
In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.
David Wong is an American philosopher. He is the Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. Wong has done work in ethics, moral psychology, comparative ethics, and Chinese philosophy. He is known for his defense of a version of moral relativism.
Dialogical analysis, or more precisely dialogical interaction analysis, refers to a way of analyzing human communication which is based on the theory of dialogism. The approach has been developed based on the theoretical work of George Herbert Mead and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin.
Theories of rhetoric and composition pedagogy encompass a wide range of interdisciplinary fields centered on the instruction of writing. Noteworthy to the discipline is the influence of classical Ancient Greece and its treatment of rhetoric as a persuasive tool. Derived from the Greek work for public speaking, rhetoric's original concern dealt primarily with the spoken word. In the treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle identifies five Canons of the field of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Since its inception in the spoken word, theories of rhetoric and composition have focused primarily on writing
Dror Green is a psychotherapist and author. He developed the method of Emotional Training, based on his concept of human nature. Although he was descended from a family that had lived in Israel for ten generations, he did not identify with Zionism, as he writes in the introduction to his book, ABC of Israeli Apartheid.
Mitchell Green is a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he sits on the steering committee of the Cognitive Science program and the executive committee of the Graduate School. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Philosophia.
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