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Isabella Bartoli

Doctoral Research Fellow - Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas

Email isabella.bartoli@ifikk.uio.no

Room 311 GMH

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Visiting address Blindernveien 31 Georg Morgenstiernes hus 0313 Oslo

Postal address Postboks 1020 Blindern 0315 Oslo

Other affiliations Faculty of Humanities (Student)

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I am a PhD fellow in Philosophy at the University of Oslo and the University of St. Andrews, under the supervision of Joey Pollock, Derek Ball and Sanford Goldberg .

You can find my CV here.

Academic Interests

I work primarily on feminist philosophy of language.

My PhD project examines the integration of moral considerations into metasemantics, with a focus on social externalism and the notion of semantic expertise.

Academic Background

I hold a BA in Philosophy, International, and Economic Studies from Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Oslo. My MA thesis, supervised by Øystein Linnebo and Joey Pollock, was on the barriers to conceptual implementation in Conceptual Engineering for socially significant social kind terms.

Tags: Philosophy, Philosophy of language, Feminist philosophy, Metasemantics, Conceptual Engineering

Publications

Scientific articles and book chapters

Bartoli, Isabella (2025). Social externalism and the implementation challenge: Revising socially and politically significant terms. Metaphilosophy. ISSN 0026-1068. 56(3-4), p. 389–406. doi: 10.1111/meta.70005. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
A central issue in conceptual engineering is the “implementation challenge”: the problem of how—or whether—conceptual revisions can be brought about, given our lack of control over the factors that determine meaning. Social externalism, which holds that semantic meaning is determined by the usage of experts within a linguistic community, seems to offer a path to controlled implementation. This paper argues that this route encounters serious obstacles in politically and socially significant cases. Drawing on Ball's (2020) distinction between Power Metasemantics and Virtue Metasemantics, the paper presents challenges for both perspectives. Power Metasemantics makes it very difficult for marginalized groups to bring about meaning change, as it is sensitive to how structural inequalities affect distributions of credibility and authority—though implementation remains possible. Virtue Metasemantics, on the other hand, faces epistemic and structural problems that may lend support to Cappelen's (2018) skepticism about implementation.

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Published Aug. 8, 2024 1:51 PM - Last modified Feb. 9, 2026 4:41 PM

Isabella Bartoli

Academic Interests

Academic Background

Publications

Research groups