Rachel Etta Rudolph

I am an Assistant Professor in the UC San Diego Philosophy Department. I work primarily in philosophy of language, including its intersection with value theory, social philosophy, and philosophy of artificial intelligence.

I am especially interested in experiential language (sentences like "this food is tasty" or "this dress looks blue"), which we use to communicate at once about the objective world and about our subjective experience. 

In other work, I explore how speakers communicate and negotiate their linguistic and conceptual commitments -- and how artificial intelligence can reflect and shape these commitments.

I received my PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. Before that,  I lived in Montreal, Canada. I was drawn to philosophy through the Liberal Arts Program at Dawson College, and completed my BA in philosophy and German at McGill University. Before moving to San Diego, I was a faculty member in the philosophy department at Auburn University.

News

• "Social Generics in Context" has been published in Philosophical Perspectives

• In April 2025, I will be giving a keynote address at the Rocky Mountain Philosophy Conference

• "Bias, machine learning, and conceptual engineering" (with Elay Shech and Mike Tamir) has been published in Philosophical Studies

• In March 2025, I will be giving a talk at the University of Rochester's Center for Language Sciences, titled "The Said and the Unsaid: A Confound for Stereotype Detection in Language Models"

Contact

rrudolph@ucsd.edu

You can find me on philpeople here and on Google Scholar here.