Dorothy Lucille Grover (9 September 1936 – 10 November 2017) was a New Zealand philosopher of logic who worked as a professor at the

University of Illinois at Chicago The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a Public university, public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its campus is in the Near West Side, Chicago, Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus esta ...

. She was known for

prosententialism A pro-sentence is a sentence where the subject pronoun has been dropped and therefore the sentence has a null subject. Overview Languages differ within this parameter, some languages such as Italian and Spanish have constant pro-drop, Finnish and ...

, a

deflationary theory of truth In philosophy and logic, a deflationary theory of truth (also semantic deflationism or simply deflationism) is one of a family of theories that all have in common the claim that assertions of predicate truth of a statement do not attribute a prop ...

in which assertions of the truth of a proposition combine with the proposition to form a

pro-sentence A pro-sentence is a sentence where the subject pronoun has been dropped and therefore the sentence has a null subject. Overview Languages differ within this parameter, some languages such as Italian and Spanish have constant pro-drop, Finnish and ...

, a part of speech which refers to the proposition itself much like a

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...

refers to a noun.

Life

Grover was from the North Island of New Zealand, where she was born on 9 September 1936. After earning a diploma in 1958 from Wellington Teachers' College, she went to

Victoria University of Wellington Victoria University of Wellington ( mi, Te Herenga Waka) is a university in Wellington, New Zealand. It was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a constituent college of the University of New Zealand. The university is well know ...

, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1962 and a master's in 1966; her master's thesis was ''Entailment: a Study of System E, and a Critical Bibliography of the Subject in General''. She came to the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the universit ...

for doctoral study, where she worked on logic with

Nuel Belnap Nuel Dinsmore Belnap Jr. (; born 1930) is an American logician and philosopher who has made contributions to the philosophy of logic, temporal logic, and structural proof theory. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1963 until his ret ...

and

Alan Ross Anderson Alan Ross Anderson (1925–1973) was an American logician and professor of philosophy at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh. A frequent collaborator with Nuel Belnap, Anderson was instrumental in the development of relevance lo ...

, completing her Ph.D. in 1970. Her dissertation was ''Topics in Propositional Quantification''. She taught philosophy at the

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UW–Milwaukee, UWM, or Milwaukee) is a public urban research university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is the largest university in the Milwaukee metropolitan area and a member of the University of Wiscons ...

for three years before moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago as a visiting assistant professor in 1972. She eventually became a full professor there, serving as department chair from 1980 to 1985 and from 1991 to 1994, and as Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. After retiring as

professor emerita ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

in 1998, she returned to New Zealand, where she died in

Christchurch Christchurch ( ; mi, Ōtautahi) is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand and the seat of the Canterbury Region. Christchurch lies on the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula on Pegasus Bay. The Avon River / ...

on 10 November 2017.

Contributions

Grover published her theory of prosententialism in a joint paper, "A prosentential theory of truth", with Belnap and Joseph Lee Camp Jr. in 1975. It was collected together with others of her essays on logic in a single-author 1992

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial su ...

book, also titled ''A Prosentential Theory of Truth''. She continued to publish papers on truth and logic after the publication of the book and after her retirement, also making forays into the

ethics Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns m ...

of decisions involving dead people ("posthumous harm").

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Grover, Dorothy 1936 births 2017 deaths New Zealand philosophers New Zealand women philosophers Victoria University of Wellington alumni University of Pittsburgh alumni University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee faculty University of Illinois Chicago faculty Philosophers of logic Women logicians