Dorothy Lucille Grover (9 September 1936 – 10 November 2017) was a New Zealand philosopher of logic who worked as a professor at the

University of Illinois at Chicago The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a public research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus established under the Universi ...

. She was known for prosententialism, a

deflationary theory of truth In philosophy and logic, a deflationary theory of truth (also semantic deflationism or simply deflationism) is one of a family of theories that all have in common the claim that assertions of predicate truth of a statement do not attribute a prop ...

in which assertions of the truth of a proposition combine with the proposition to form a

pro-sentence A pro-sentence is a sentence where the subject pronoun has been dropped and therefore the sentence has a null subject. Overview Languages differ within this parameter, some languages such as Italian and Spanish have constant pro-drop, Finnish a ...

, a part of speech which refers to the proposition itself much like a

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (Interlinear gloss, glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts of speech, but so ...

refers to a noun.

Life

Grover was from the North Island of New Zealand, where she was born on 9 September 1936. After earning a diploma in 1958 from Wellington Teachers' College, she went to

Victoria University of Wellington Victoria University of Wellington (), also known by its shorter names "VUW" or "Vic", is a public university, public research university in Wellington, New Zealand. It was established in 1897 by Act of New Zealand Parliament, Parliament, and w ...

, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1962 and a master's in 1966; her master's thesis was ''Entailment: a Study of System E, and a Critical Bibliography of the Subject in General''. She came to the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

for doctoral study, where she worked on logic with

Nuel Belnap Nuel Dinsmore Belnap Jr. (; May 1, 1930 – June 12, 2024) was an American logician and philosopher who has made contributions to the philosophy of logic, temporal logic, and structural proof theory. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh ...

and

Alan Ross Anderson Alan Ross Anderson (1925–1973) was an American logician and professor of philosophy at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh. A frequent collaborator with Nuel Belnap, Anderson was instrumental in the development of relevance ...

, completing her Ph.D. in 1970. Her dissertation was ''Topics in Propositional Quantification''. She taught philosophy at the

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UW–Milwaukee, UWM, or Milwaukee) is a Public university, public Urban university, urban research university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. It is the largest university in the Milwaukee metropo ...

for three years before moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago as a visiting assistant professor in 1972. She eventually became a full professor there, serving as department chair from 1980 to 1985 and from 1991 to 1994, and as Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. During this time in the 90s, Dorothy also engaged DCFS with an interest in adopting a child in need. Being told that most people choose to adopt a new born, Dorothy fostered an older child, Michael, and eventually adopted him. After retiring as

professor emerita ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retirement, retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". ...

in 1998, she returned to New Zealand, where she died in

Christchurch Christchurch (; ) is the largest city in the South Island and the List of cities in New Zealand, second-largest city by urban area population in New Zealand. Christchurch has an urban population of , and a metropolitan population of over hal ...

on 10 November 2017.. She was survived by her adopted son, Michael Anthony (Tony), and granddaughter Komai Rosa.

Contributions

Grover published her theory of prosententialism in a joint paper, "A prosentential theory of truth", with Belnap and Joseph Lee Camp Jr. in 1975. It was collected together with others of her essays on logic in a single-author 1992

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial ...

book, also titled ''A Prosentential Theory of Truth''. She continued to publish papers on truth and logic after the publication of the book and after her retirement, also making forays into the

ethics Ethics is the philosophy, philosophical study of Morality, moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates Normativity, normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches inclu ...

of decisions involving dead people ("posthumous harm").

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Grover, Dorothy 1936 births 2017 deaths 20th-century New Zealand philosophers New Zealand women philosophers Victoria University of Wellington alumni University of Pittsburgh alumni University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee faculty University of Illinois Chicago faculty Philosophers of logic Women logicians