Prof. Daniel Dor is a linguist, communication researcher and political activist, recently retired from Tel Aviv University. He has written extensively on language and its unique role in human life and human evolution, as well as on the role of the modern media in the construction of political hegemony.

In his The Instruction of Imagination (OUP, 2015), Dor re-thinks language as a socially constructed tool, designed by cultural evolution to allow speakers to bridge the experiential gaps between them and their listeners – by instructing their listeners’ imagination. This view of the function of language sheds new light on the affordances, limitations and difficulties of linguistic communication, and clarifies the difference between talking to a human and talking to a machine.