Abstract

Understanding has often been regarded as a kind of knowledge. This paper argues that this view is very implausible for understanding words. Instead, a proper account will be of the “analytic-genetic” variety: it will describe immersion in the practice of using a word in such a way that even those not previously equipped with the concepts the word expresses can become immersed. Meeting this condition requires attention to findings in developmental psychology. If you understand a declarative utterance, you thereby know what the speaker said in uttering the words she did. The converse is close to true: if you come to know what a speaker of a declarative utterance has said, then normally you understand the utterance. An example of an abnormal situation would be one in which the speaker’s utterance is in a language you do not understand, but you are authoritatively informed, and so know, what the speaker said. The connection between understanding a whole utterance and knowing something can be preserved by alluding to the basis of the knowledge: it should arise from understanding the words in the utterance, and how they are put together. This leads to a fairly uncontroversial conditional equivalence: (1) If an utterer of an utterance, U, thereby says that p then: (X knows this, on the basis of understanding the words in U and how they are put together) iff (X understands U). The relevant knowledge has no mysteries: it is propositional, typically fully explicit, and is invoked in memory and in reports of speech. The question to be addressed in this paper is whether we can apply this kind of connection between understanding and knowledge to explain what is taken for granted in the equivalence 2 above, namely, the understanding of words. I will suggest that we cannot. Under some idealizations, one can formulate necessarily true equivalences between understanding a word and knowing something, but these equivalences are unilluminating. The knowledge is not of the straightforward kind invoked in connection with whole utterances, and it is mysterious how one might come to possess it. An account of understanding words requires an “analytic-genetic” story, an analysis which offers some philosophical illumination while being consistent with what is known about the genesis of participation in linguistic practices.