Education
Sher earned a Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from Columbia University, where she studied the works of Willard Quine and Alfred Tarski.
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Gila Sher
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She has worked extensively in the theory of truth and philosophy of logic. Her dissertation was directed by Charles Parsons. 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), in which Sher also formalized definitions for unique second-order quantifiers such as "most". The former view she considers unexplanatory, and the latter she considers untenable (see: Jerry Fodor).
Sher has also written more generally on the metaphysics of truth. She is also a leading Quine scholar, writing about the place of philosophy in his theory of naturalized epistemology.
Since 2012, she is one of editors-in-chief of the journal Synthese.
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Sher is a leading advocate of foundational holism, a holistic theory of epistemology. 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. She put forward an influential criticism of John Etchemendy in the article "Did Tarski Commit Tarski"s Fallacy?" This article was influential in defending Tarskian truth theory from the radical attack posed by Etchemendy.
