Nadja-Mira Yolcu is an academic staff member and doctoral student at the Chair of Theoretical Philosophy and Philosophy of Language. Since July 2018 she has been a member of the research project “Mind the Meaning: The Philosophy of Psychological Expressivism”. After her undergraduate studies in philosophy (minor: psychology) at the University of Heidelberg, she earned a BPhil in Philosophy (master’s degree) from the University of Oxford in summer 2017. During her studies in Heidelberg and Oxford she received a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Ms Yolcu’s research interests focus mainly on philosophy of language and epistemology. In her dissertation project Ms Yolcu aims to give an (expressivist) analysis of utterances of negative self-ascriptions of mental states. Her teaching focuses on philosophy of language and epistemology.
Doctoral project
Expressing Myself: Disavowals and the Mind (working title)
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Freitag, Chair of Philosophy I
The dissertation project aims to develop an expressivist analysis for the negation of avowals. So far, expressivist theories (Wittgenstein 1953; Bar-On 2004, 2015; Finkelstein 2003; Freitag 2014, 2018) have focused on positive avowals. But negated avowals (disavowals), e.g., “I don’t hope that it is raining,” pose, or seem to pose, a serious problem to avowal expressivism. It is unclear what the utterance of a negated avowal is supposed to express – how can one express the absence of a mental state? The purpose of the dissertation is to examine negated avowals. I will tentatively claim that, in spite of the mentioned problem, they can receive an expressivist interpretation. I propose that disavowals constitute cases of expressive denegation. Thus, we can avoid a descriptivist backlash. An expressivist interpretation of disavowals will, furthermore, contribute to a new understanding of various philosophical problems such as Moore’s paradox and suspension of belief.
Publications
2022: “Vindicating Avowal Expressivism: A Note on Rosenthal's Performance-Conditional Equivalence Thesis”. Phenomenology and Mind, https://journals.openedition.org/phenomenology/1107
2021: “An expressivist solution to Moorean paradoxes”, gemeinsam mit Wolfgang Freitag. Synthese, Januar 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-03012-4
2019: Edmund Gettier. Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? / Ist gerechtfertigte, wahre Überzeugung Wissen? Herausgabe und Übersetzung gemeinsam mit Marc Andree Weber. Reclam.
2015: „Eine kurze Einleitung in die Freiburger Philosophie”, gemeinsam mit Katharina Kraus. Chinesische Übersetzung in: Huang Yusheng (ed.), Tsinghua Studies in Western Philosophy vol. 1 no. 2, Tsinghua University, China.