Dorit Bar-On is a Professor of

Philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

at the University of Connecticut and Director of the Expression, Communication, and the Origins of Meaning (ECOM) Research Group. Her research focuses on philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaethics. 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.

Education and career

Bar-On earned a BA at Tel Aviv University in Philosophy & Linguistics before earning her MA and PhD in Philosophy at UCLA. Her dissertation, ''Indeterminacy of Translation: Theory and Practice'', was written under the supervision of Tyler Burge,

Rogers Albritton Rogers Garland Albritton (August 15, 1923 – May 21, 2002) was an American philosopher who served as chair of the Harvard and UCLA philosophy departments. He published little (only five research papers during his lifetime) and inspired the entry ...

Keith Donnellan Keith Sedgwick Donnellan (; June 25, 1931 – February 20, 2015) was an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy (later Professor Emeritus) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Donnellan contributed to the philosophy of language ...

, David Kaplan, and

David Pears __NOTOC__ David Francis Pears, FBA (8 August 1921 – 1 July 2009) was a British philosopher renowned for his work on Ludwig Wittgenstein. An Old Boy of Westminster School,David Pears: philosopher'' (obituary) ''The Times,'' 3 July 2009, Archi ...

. 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 John Roderigo Dos Passos (; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist, most notable for his ''U.S.A.'' trilogy. Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a young man, visit ...

Dorothy Richardson Dorothy Miller Richardson (17 May 1873 – 17 June 1957) was a British author and journalist. Author of ''Pilgrimage'', a sequence of 13 semi-autobiographical novels published between 1915 and 1967—though Richardson saw them as chapters of o ...

E. E. Cummings Edward Estlin Cummings, who was also known as E. E. Cummings, e. e. cummings and e e cummings (October 14, 1894 - September 3, 1962), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobi ...

, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, and, in collaboration with Marcia Falk, a collection of poems by Zelda Schneerson Mishkovsky and ''The Book of Blessings''. 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. Bar-On also formerly served as the President of MYCO@UNC, a youth chamber organization, from 2009 to 2012.

Research

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. 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 Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

structure. ''Speaking My Mind'' has been praised 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." In subsequent work, Bar-On has applied this neo-expressivist framework to additional problems in the philosophy of language, metaethics, and epistemology. 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.

Selected publications

*“First-Person Authority: Dualism, Constitutivism, and Neo-Expressivism” ''Erkenntnis'' 2009 *“The Use of Force Against Deflationism: Assertion and Truth”, (with Keith Simmons) in ''Truth and Speech Acts: Studies in the Philosophy of Language'', Greimann and Siegwart, eds., Routledge, 2007, 61–89. *“Deflationism”, (with Keith Simmons) in ''Oxford Handbook in Philosophy of Language'', Ernie LePore, ed., Oxford University Press, 2006, 607–630. ISBN 978-0-19-925941-0.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bar-On, Dorit Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) 20th-century American philosophers 21st-century American philosophers University of California, Los Angeles alumni University of Connecticut faculty Tel Aviv University alumni American women linguists American translators American epistemologists American philosophers of mind American philosophers of language Philosophers from Connecticut