Gila Sher

Gila Sher is an American logician and professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She has worked extensively in the theory of truth and philosophy of logic. Sher is a leading advocate of foundational holism, a holistic theory of epistemology.

Gila Sher
Born
Israel
Alma materHebrew University of Jerusalem[1]
Columbia University
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic philosophy
Doctoral advisorCharles Parsons
Main interests
Philosophy of logic, epistemology, metaphysics
Notable ideas
Foundational holism

Education and career

In 1989, Sher earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University,[1] where she studied the works of Willard Quine and Alfred Tarski. Her dissertation was directed by Charles Parsons.

Since 2017, Sher has been an editor of the Journal of Philosophy, and from 2012 to 2017, she was an editor-in-chief of the journal Synthese.[2] Sher has also served as the president of the International Society for Formal Ontology since 2017.[3]

Philosophical work

Her early work focused on Tarski's definition of truth. Her reformulation of this definition has been influential in modern truth theory. Her dissertation was expanded into the book The Bounds of Logic (1991),[4] in which Sher also formalized definitions for unique second-order quantifiers such as 'most'.[4]

Sher has pursued research into logical positivism and logical foundationalism. She has argued that strict-ordering foundationalism, in the vein of Rudolf 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).[5]

Sher has also written more generally on the metaphysics of truth. She put forward a criticism of John Etchemendy in the article "Did Tarski Commit Tarski's Fallacy?"[6] This article defended 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.[7]

Books
  • 1991. The Bounds of Logic, MIT.
  • 2000. Between Logic and Intuition: Essays in Honor of Charles Parsons. Editor (with R. Tieszen), Cambridge.
  • 2016. Epistemic Friction: An Essay on Knowledge, Truth, and Logic. Oxford University Press.

References
  1. CV
  2. "Synthese".
  3. Sher, Gila (January 23, 2019). "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF).
  4. Sher, Gila. (1991), The Bounds of Logic, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  5. Sher, Gila. (2004), In Search of a Substantive Theory of Truth, The Journal of Philosophy
  6. Sher, Gila. (1996), Did Tarski Commit Tarski's Fallacy?, The Journal of Symbolic Logic 61, 653-86.
  7. Sher, Gila. (1999), Is There a Place for Philosophy in Quine's Theory?, The Journal of Philosophy 96, 491-524.
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