Kathrin Glüer-Pagin

Kathrin Glüer-Pagin

E-mail: kathrin.gluer at philosophy.su.se

Born 1966 in Hamburg, Germany. Basic education at Hamburg University and at UC Berkeley. MA 1991, Hamburg University, Dr.phil. 1997, Humboldt University, Berlin. Visiting scholar, Columbia University, New York 1993. Assistant Professor, Humboldt University, Berlin 1997-2002. Researcher, HSFR project 'Knowledge and Meaning Theory', Stockholm University 1999. 'Forskarassistent' in Theoretical Philosophy, Uppsala University 2002-2006. Docent (Associate Professor) 2003. Researcher, VR project 'The Semantics of Experience', Stockholm University 2006/7. Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Stockholm University since August 2007. Senior sabbatical researcher with the Logos Research Group at the University of Barcelona, spring/summer 2008. Visiting fellow, Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, June-August 2009. Fellow, Institut d'Etudes Avancées, Paris, and visiting fellow, Institut Jean-Nicod, January-June 2010.

I am mainly working in the philosophy of mind and language. I am also interested in aspects of epistemology and action theory, especially where these intersect with the theory of content.

An expanded version of my M.A. thesis was published as Donald Davidson zur Einführung in 1993 (Hamburg, Junius Verlag). Donald Davidson: A Short Introduction, an updated and expanded English version of the German original, is under preparation for Oxford University Press.

My dissertation Sprache und Regeln. Zur Normativität von Bedeutung (Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1999) is basically an attack on the idea of semantic normativity. It presents and assesses the contemporary debate around this idea and defends the conclusion that meaning is not intrinsically normative, not essentially determined by norms, rules or conventions. The positions discussed include those of Dummett, Davidson, Kripke, McDowell, and Putnam as well as more or less orthodox Wittgensteinian positions. Partly in cooperation with Peter Pagin and Åsa Wikforss, I have expanded and complemented the arguments presented in the dissertation in later articles.

My current research is on a number of topics: I am very interested in the theory of perception, especially as an area in which epistemology and the theory of content intersect. The project 'The Semantics of Experience' aims at developing and defending a position in the philosophy of perception that I call 'phenomenal intentionalism'. It construes perceptual experiences as a kind of belief with a rather particular form of content: content involving phenomenal qualities. I am currently working on a monograph developing and defending this position.

With Peter Pagin, I have worked on the relevance of autistic speakers to theories of meaning, arguing that they provide counterexamples to Gricean theories of meaning. We have also worked on the semantics of proper names and modal operators, suggesting a new construal of intensional operators favorable to a descriptivist semantics of names. Recently, we have expanded our 'evaluation switcher semantics' to cover general terms in a way that accounts for the name-like behavior of natural kind terms while allowing them to have descriptive contents as well. I have written on meaning holism, on the status and significance of principles of foundational semantics, such as the Davidsonian principle of charity, and on semantic externalism as well as on the linguistic doctrine of necessity, the analytic conception of a priori knowledge, on implicit definition and analyticity, and on the semantics of color terms.

Kathrin Glüer-Pagin

Area of specialty

Workshops

Selected Publications

1. Monographs

2. Articles

3. Manuscripts