Gila Sher is a professor of philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 at the University of California, San Diego

University of California, San Diego

The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...

. She has worked extensively in the theory of truth

Truth

Truth has a variety of meanings, such as the state of being in accord with fact or reality. It can also mean having fidelity to an original or to a standard or ideal. In a common usage, it also means constancy or sincerity in action or character...

 and philosophy of logic

Philosophy of logic

Following the developments in Formal logic with symbolic logic in the late nineteenth century and mathematical logic in the twentieth, topics traditionally treated by logic not being part of formal logic have tended to be termed either philosophy of logic or philosophical logic if no longer simply...

. Sher is a leading advocate of foundational holism

Holism

Holism is the idea that all the properties of a given system cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone...

, a holistic theory of epistemology.

Sher earned a Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in philosophy from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, where she studied the works of Willard Quine and Alfred Tarski

Alfred Tarski

Alfred Tarski was a Polish logician and mathematician. Educated at the University of Warsaw and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic and the Warsaw School of Mathematics and philosophy, he emigrated to the USA in 1939, and taught and carried out research in mathematics at the University of...

. Her dissertation was directed by Charles Parsons

Charles Parsons (philosopher)

Charles Dacre Parsons is a distinguished figure in the philosophy of mathematics.He is a son of social scientist Talcott Parsons. A specialist in the philosophy of mathematics and logic, Parsons earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1961, under the direction of Burton Dreben and Willard Van...

. Her early work focused on Tarski's definition of truth. Her reformulation of this definition has been influential in modern truth theory. Her dissertation was expanded into the book The Bounds of Logic (1991), in which Sher also formalized definitions for unique second-order quantifiers such as 'most'.

Sher has pursued research into logical positivism

Logical positivism

Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...

 and logical foundationalism

Foundationalism

Foundationalism is any theory in epistemology that holds that beliefs are justified based on what are called basic beliefs . This position is intended to resolve the infinite regress problem in epistemology...

. She has argued that strict-ordering Foundationalism, in the vein of Rudolf Carnap

Rudolf Carnap

Rudolf Carnap was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism....

, is untenable, supporting Quine's argument from Two Dogmas of Empiricism

Two Dogmas of Empiricism

W. V. Quine's paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism, published in 1951, is one of the most celebrated papers of twentieth century philosophy in the analytic tradition. According to Harvard professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper [is] sometimes regarded as the most important in all of...

. She has, however, resisted the mainstream move toward all-or-nothing and semantic holism. The former view she considers unexplanatory, and the latter she considers untenable (see: Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...

).

Sher has also written more generally on the metaphysics

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...

 of truth. She put forward an influential criticism of John Etchemendy

John Etchemendy

John W. Etchemendy and of Basque descent is Stanford University's twelfth and current Provost. He succeeded John L. Hennessy to the post on September 1, 2000....

in the article "Did Tarski Commit Tarski's Fallacy?" This article was influential in defending Tarskian truth theory from the radical attack posed by Etchemendy. She is also a leading Quine scholar, writing about the place of philosophy in his theory of naturalized epistemology.