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Bar-Hillel, Y. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was an Israeli philosopher of language, science and information, and one of the founding fathers of pragmatics in the twentieth century. Bar-Hillel was born in Vienna in 1915, emigrated in 1933, and studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During World War II he served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Forces. He also participated in the 1948 Israel War of Independence, during which he was injured and lost an eye while trying to rescue comrades. Bar-Hillel died in Jerusalem in 1975. From 1961 Bar-Hillel was Professor of Logic

and Philosophy of Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a member of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 1963. Bar-Hillel was a visiting professor in various research institutes, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he met Noam Chomsky. At the University of Chicago he worked with Rudolf Carnap, one of the leaders of the highly influential philosophical movement of logical empiricism. Bar-Hillel became one of Carnap’s major followers. Bar-Hillel’s scientific works included three

significant novelties. First, he initiated the systematic study, both in philosophy and in linguistics, of pragmatics, the study of language use. His 1954 paper ‘Indexical Expressions’, published in the journal Mind, was one of the formative contributions to pragmatics. The paper drew attention to the ubiquity of indexical expressions in natural language and to the problems it creates for natural logic, the study of arguments in natural language. Logical relations were usually taken to hold between ‘propositions’ which

had constant meanings. Expressions that include an indexical element, such as ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’ or a verb of a certain tense, were argued by BarHillel to be of a different nature that cannot be incorporated into classical logics. Later philosophical studies of the semantics and pragmatics of indexical expressions, by David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague and others, have shown the philosophical depth and pregnancy of the area to which Bar-Hillel had drawn attention. Second, Bar-Hillel’s work created an original

and reasonable combination of conceptions that had developed in two separate philosophical traditions, commonly held to be alternatives to each other. One tradition is that of logical empiricism, as manifest in Carnap’s works, from which Bar-Hillel adopted the conviction that science is the human device of knowledge and understanding of the world and the method of using formal systems for presentation of scientific theories. Another tradition is that of rationalism, as manifest in Chomsky’s works, from which Bar-Hillel adopted the conception of language, its cognitive representation in the human mind/brain and its use in human life. Third, Bar-Hillel developed the notion of ‘categorical grammar’, which was later used in a variety of studies, including in formal pragmatics. Among Bar-Hillel’s books are Foundations of Set

Theory (Fraenkel and Bar-Hillel 1958; Fraenkel et al. 1973), Aspects of Language (Bar-Hillel 1970), and Pragmatics of Natural Languages (Bar-Hillel 1971).