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Michael Devitt (born 1938) is an Australian philosopher currently teaching at the City University of New York in New York City. His primary interests include philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His current work involves the philosophy of linguistics, foundational issues in semantics, the semantics of definite descriptions and demonstratives, semantic externalism, and scientific realism. He is a noted proponent of the causal theory of reference. He claims that repeated groundings in an object can account for reference change. However, such a response leaves open the problem of cognitive significance that originally intrigued Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. Michael Devitt, along with Georges Rey, is also a critic of the transcendental argument against eliminativism, and defends this position against claims that it is self-refuting by invoking deflationary semantic theories that avoid analysing predicates like "x is true" as expressing a real property. They are construed, instead, as logical devices so that asserting that a sentence is true is just a quoted way of asserting the sentence itself. To say, "'God exists' is true" is just to say, "God exists". This way, Rey and Devitt argue, in so far as dispositional replacements of "claims" and deflationary accounts of "true" are coherent, eliminativism is not self-refuting.〔Devitt, M. & Rey, G. (1991). ''Transcending Transcendentalism'' in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72: 87-100.〕 Devitt is a known critic of constructivist epistemology. ==Education== Devitt's secondary education (1952–1957) was at Bradfield College in Berkshire, England, where he completed 3 “A” Levels and 9 “O” Levels. He then studied at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia between 1958–1961, taking his qualifying exam at the end of that time. His higher education began at the University of Sydney in 1962, where he studied philosophy and psychology. He graduated in 1966 with First Class Honours and a University Medal in philosophy. He continued on as a post-graduate research student until 1967, when he moved to Harvard University and studied under Quine. He received his MA in 1970 and his PhD in 1972. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Michael Devitt」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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