Bild: Daniela Haupt
Nadja-Mira Yolcu ist Akademische Mitarbeiterin am Lehrstuhl für Theoretische Philosophie/
Dissertationsprojekt
Expression and Negation: An Expressivist Account of Disavowals
Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Freitag, Lehrstuhl Philosophie I
The dissertation project aims to develop an expressivist analysis of negative avowals. So far, expressivist theories (Wittgenstein 1953; Bar-On 2004, 2015; Finkelstein 2003; Freitag 2014, 2018) have focused on positive avowals. But negative avowals (disavowals), e.g., utterances of “I don’t hope that it is raining,” pose, or seem to pose, a serious problem to avowal expressivism. It is unclear what a speaker expresses with a negative avowal – how can one express the absence of a mental state? The purpose of the dissertation is to examine negative avowals. I will tentatively claim that, despite the mentioned problem, they can receive an expressivist analysis. I propose that disavowals constitute cases of expressive denegation. Thus, we can avoid a descriptivist backlash. An expressivist analysis of disavowals will, furthermore, contribute to a new understanding of various philosophical problems such as Moore’s paradox and suspension of belief.
The dissertation was submitted in December 2022 and successfully defended in April 2024.
Veröffentlichungen
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.