- Gila Sher
Infobox_Philosopher
region = Western Philosophy
era =20th-century philosophy
color = #B0C4DEimage_caption =
name = Gila Sher| birth =
Israel
school_tradition =Analytic Philosophy ,Holism
main_interests =Philosophy of Logic ,Epistemology
influences = W. V. Quine,Alfred Tarski
influenced =Richard Tieszen ,John Etchemendy
notable_ideas = Foundational Holism|Gila Sher is a professor of
philosophy at theUniversity of California, San Diego . She has worked extensively in the theory oftruth andphilosophy of logic . Sher is a leading advocate of foundationalholism , a holistic theory ofepistemology .Sher earned a
Ph.D. in philosophy fromColumbia University , where she studied the works ofWillard Quine andAlfred Tarski . Her dissertation was directed byCharles Parsons . Her early work focused on Tarski's definition of truth. Her reformulation of this definition has been influential in modern truth theory. Herdissertation was expanded into the book "The Bounds of Logic"(1991) [Sher, Gila. (1991), "The Bounds of Logic", Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.] , in which Sher also formalized definitions for unique second-order quantifiers such as 'most' [Sher, Gila. (1991), "The Bounds of Logic", Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.] .Sher has also pursued research into
logical positivism and logicalfoundationalism . She has argued that strict-ordering Foundationalism, in the vein ofRudolf Carnap , is untenable, supporting Quine's argument from "Two Dogmas of Empiricism ". She has, however, resisted the mainstream move toward all-or-nothing and semantic holism. The former view she considers unexplanatory, and the latter she considers untenable (see:Jerry Fodor ). [Sher, Gila. (2004), "In Search of a Substantive Theory of Truth", The Journal of Philosophy.] .Sher has also written more generally on the
metaphysics of truth. She put forward an influential criticism ofJohn Etchemendy in the article "Did Tarski Commit Tarski's Fallacy?" [Sher, Gila. (1996), "Did Tarski Commit Tarski's Fallacy?", The Journal of Symbolic Logic 61, 653-86.] This article was influential in defending Tarskian truth theory from the radical attack posed by Etchemendy. She is also a leading Quine scholar, writing about the place of philosophy in his theory of naturalized epistemology [Sher, Gila. (1999), "Is There a Place for Philosophy in Quine's Theory?", The Journal of Philosophy 96, 491-524.] .External links
* [http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/gsher/ Academic homepage at UCSD]
Bibliography
* 1991. "The Bounds of Logic", MIT.
* 2000. "Between Logic and Intuition: Essays in Honor of Charles Parsons." Editor (with R. Tieszen), Cambridge.References
* http://www.logika.umk.pl/llp/02/br.pdf
* http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=9403
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