Genoveva Martí

Genoveva Martí

Universitat de Barcelona

Humanities

I was born in Barcelona and I obtained my BA at the University of Barcelona. In 1982 I joined the PhD program at Stanford University, where my PhD was awarded in January 1989. I have been Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside, and Reader at the London School of Economics. In 2014-15 I was Professor of Philosophy at Western University, Ontario (Canada). I have been coordinator of the research group LOGOS (http://www.ub.es/grc_logos ). I was awarded the Narcís Monturiol Medal by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2012. I am an elected member of the Academia Europaea. Between 2017 and 2022 I was Chair of the Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Section of the Academia Europaea. From 2018 till 2022 I was  Vice-President of the Academia Europaea.

Research interests

My research focuses on the exploration of reference, the relation between words and pieces of the world that makes it possible to talk about things. Traditionally, reference has been conceived as mediated by our cognitive perspective on things. On this view, which objects we talk about is determined by the concepts we associate with the expressions we use. Against this view I defend an approach to semantics according to which reference is not determined just by our mental states nor by the concepts we entertain; it rather depends on causal and social factors that are external to our mind. My research topics are connected to research areas in Linguistics and Psychology. I also have worked on the explanation of legal disputes from the point of view of different theories of reference, on the role of the theory of reference in the defense of scientific realism and on the impact of experimental data on semantics. A critical paper on experimental semantics has been recently accepted by dialectica and is available online ( https://doi.org/10.48106/dial.v74.i3.06 )

Selected publications

- Martí G 2022, 'Reference and Theories of Reference'. Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.): The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press, pp. 233-265.

Selected research activities

Research presentations

‘Reflexiones sobre la filosofía experimental’. Filósofas en Streaming. March 16 2022.

‘Semantic Experiments’. Workshop in honor of Mark Sainsbury. London, May 16-17 2022.

'X-Phi. Methodology'. Discussion leader, with Edouard Machery. X-Phi Gathering. Hudson, New York. June 21st-22nd 2022.

‘Testing the Antinomy of Taste’. London Aesthetics Forum. November 16th 2022.