This paper exploits recent work on the normative and constitutive roles of knowledge in practical rationality, to put pressure on the idea that speakers could communicate without exploiting linguistic knowledge. I defend cognitivism about meaning, the view that speakers have rationally accessible (i.e., implicit rather than tacit) knowledge of semantic facts and principles, and that this knowledge is constitutive of their linguistic competence.

Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore have recently criticized Davidson's methodology of radical interpretation because of its apparent failure to reflect how actual interpretation is achieved. Responding to such complaints, Davidson claims that he is not interested in the empirical issues surrounding actual interpretation but instead focuses on the question of what conditions make interpretation possible. It is argued that this exchange between Fodor and Lepore on one side, and Davidson on the other, cannot be viewed simply as a naturalist reaction (...) to non-naturalist philosophical inquiry. Through a careful excavation of the hidden assumptions and commitments underlying this debate, we recognize a more serious disagreement over the intellectual obligations of naturalism; a position with a firm hold on current philosophical imaginations. In the process, we gain a new appreciation for how such commitments shape these naturalist positions, and recognize that any resolution to this specific debate will require careful attention to the divergent commitments that are its real source. (shrink)

A series of papers on different aspects of practical knowledge by Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, J. C. Nyiri, Eva Picardi, Joachim Schulte Roger Scruton, Barry Smith and Johan Wrede.

§§3-4 of the Begriffsschrift present Frege’s objections to a dominant if murky nineteenth-century semantic picture. I sketch a minimalist variant of the pre-Fregean picture which escapes Frege’s criticisms by positing a thin notion of semantic content which then interacts with a multiplicity of kinds of truth to account for phenomena such as modality. After exploring several ways in which we can understand the existence of multiple truth properties, I discuss the roles of pointwise and setwise truth properties in modal logic. (...) I argue that thinking of supertruth and determinate truth as setwise truth properties allows an understanding of supervaluationist approaches to vagueness which escapes both Williamson’s objections to and a needless metalinguistic orientation of traditional supervaluationism. (shrink)

What is the best way to understand 'applies to' when it is said of a linguistic theory that it applies to a particular language-user? We can answer by saying that a linguistic theory is applicable to an individual language-user just in case that individual tacitly-knows the theory. But this is an uninformative answer until we are told how to understand 'tacit-knowledge'. The end goal of this thesis is to defend the claim that we should take tacit-knowledge to be, simply, knowledge. (...) Towards this end I argue against the satisfactoriness of competing ways of understanding 'tacit-knowledge'. For example, the instrumentalist position is neutral on whether linguistic theories are actually known by the ordinary language-users who tacitly-know them; instead, linguistic theories are to be such that knowing them would enable someone to do whatever it is that the tacit-knower can do. Other competing positions hold that, though tacit-knowledge is a psychological relation of some sort, it is not genuine knowledge. I also attempt to meet specific objections to the claim that a typical language-user could plausibly be said to know a linguistic theory. An objection on which I focus is based on the claim that typical language-users do not possess the requisite concepts for having genuine knowledge of a linguistic theory. The aim in attempting to meet these objections is to open up the way for the linguistic theorist to exploit a paradigm of explanation: explanation of behaviour by knowledge attribution. Attributing knowledge of linguistic theories would be potentially explanatory of linguistic behaviour in exactly the same way that attributions of knowledge in non-linguistic spheres are potentially explanatory of behaviour. Finally, because my emphasis is specifically on semantic theories, I attempt to explicate and defend the claim that a semantic theory could and should have the form of a theory of truth. (shrink)