I’m helping to organise a workshop on propositions at CSMN. With the very worthwhile gendered conference campaign and the recent BPA/SWIPUK report at the back of my mind I started to wonder if any female philosophers were working on propositions. I couldn’t think of any. I scanned a few bibliographies and didn’t discover any. Am I just failing to recall some important people, or are there really only male philosophers interested in these issues?
EDIT: I remembered somebody after I posted: Friederike Moltmann.
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Robin Jeshion, Delia Graff Fara, Emma Borg?
Thanks.
I was thinking of Robin Jeshion and Delia Graff Fara as being mostly interested in attitude-reports. Of course the issues are linked. If the propositions field is taken broadly there are several more prominent women to add. Berit Brogaard and Jenny Saul come immediately to mind. I’m sure there are more.
Has Emma Borg worked much on propositions? I’ve read quite a lot of her work on the semantics/pragmatics distinction but I’ve never come across anything specifically on propositions.
The phrase “women working on propositions” can be taken very broadly to include almost any female who works in semantics or pragmatics (or mental content, for that matter). But you seem to have in mind something like “the metaphysics of propositions”. Is that right? If so, then Brogaard definitely counts (see her “Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions”).
What specific questions about propositions do you have in mind? I think that would help generate some answers.
I should have been clearer about that. I mean the metaphysics of propositions, questions about their existence and nature. Otherwise I would have been able to include most of philosophy of language and a good part of linguistics.