CUNY Writing Fellows- Boone Gorges

I grew up in northeastern Wisconsin. I attended college at Cornell College in Iowa, where I majored in Philosophy, Russian, and French. During my last year at Cornell, I flirted with the idea of attending graduate school in linguistics. Researching linguistics programs on the internet proved difficult, however--time after time, I found myself meandering instead to philosophy department websites, and swooning. Indulging these romantic whims, I decided to pursue philosophy. In the fall of 2002 I matriculated in the philosophy Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

My interest in the workings of language never waned, though, and as a result, my graduate studies have largely focused on the philosophy of language. For example, what is the meaning of a fictional name? Most names--take 'George W. Bush', for example--get their meaning from the thing they stand for--in this case, George W. Bush. But what about names like 'Homer Simpson'? It seems clear that Homer Simpson doesn't exist--that is, there's nothing that 'Homer Simpson' stands for. On the other hand, we are able to make meaningful (and sometimes true!) sentences containing the name: 'Homer Simpson is overweight', for instance. The story here must differ from the parallel story about 'George W. Bush', since there is no Homer Simpson. Perhaps 'Homer Simpson' stands for a bunch of ideas in our collective imaginations (ideas about a fat father of three who works in a nuclear power plant, etc.). But if 'Homer Simpson' just stands for a bunch of ideas, sentences like 'Homer Simpson does not exist' end up being false, since our ideas do exist, and sentences like 'Homer Simpson is overweight' end up being false, since ideas can't be fat. The goal is to find a way of explaining terms like 'Homer Simpson' while avoiding these counterintuitive conclusions.

This curiosity about language and the way we use it fuels my excitement for the WAC program. As a CUNY Writing Fellow, I will use my philosopher's toolkit to bring into clearer focus the challenges of implementing writing across the curriculum, and to develop practical and efficacious approaches to these challenges.