Michael Devitt
Australian philosopher
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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.
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Academic positions
Following the completion of his coursework at Harvard, Michael Devitt returned to Sydney in 1971 and began his teaching career as a lecturer in the Philosophy department. He was prominent in the 'Sydney philosophy disturbances'. He was made a senior lecturer in 1977 and associate professor in 1982, and by 1985 was named as Head of Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy. He continued teaching at the University of Sydney until 1987, after which he returned to the United States and accepted an appointment of Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1988. He remained in Maryland until 1999, when he became a Professor (later Distinguished Professor) at the CUNY Graduate Center. There he served as the Executive Officer of the Philosophy Program from 1999–2002. He continues to teach there as a Distinguished Professor as of 2012.
In addition to his tenured or tenure-track positions, Michael Devitt has held numerous non-tenured positions at the University of Nottingham, Macquarie University, Australian National University, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Harvard University, and The Women's College, University of Sydney.
Devitt was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1985.
Philosophical work
Devitt is a 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.
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.