Inferential practical knowledge of meaning

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Speakers of a natural language regularly form justified beliefs about what others are saying when they utter sentences of the language. What accounts for these justified beliefs? At one level, we already have a plausible answer: there is a perfectly good ordinary sense in which users of a language know what its sentences mean, and it is very plausible that the hearer’s knowledge of the meaning of S helps explain her justification for her belief about what is said by an utterance of S. But what exactly does our knowledge of sentence meanings consist in? In this essay I advance and defend the view that we know the meanings of sentences in virtue of having a certain distinctive kind of know-how that I call inferential practical knowledge. I argue that this view provides the best explanation for the justification of our beliefs about what is said. In particular, it provides a better explanation than the more conventional and widely accepted view that we know the meaning of S in virtue of possessing the theoretical knowledge that S has such-and-such meaning.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,960

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Semantic Competence: Speakers' Knowledge and Expression.R. Tanaka - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Connecticut
Is meaning cognized?David Balcarras - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (5):1276-1295.
Pragmatics and Semantics: Grice 1968, Schiffer 2015, Schiffer 1972.Richard Warner - 2024 - In Alessandro Capone, Pietro Perconti & Roberto Graci (eds.), Philosophy, Cognition and Pragmatics. Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 87-100.
Meaning and Compositional Structure.Gary Martin Ebbs - 1988 - Dissertation, University of Michigan
What I know when I know a language.Barry C. Smith - 2005 - In Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Toward a Theory of Linguistic Knowledge.Brian D. Brost - 2000 - Dissertation, The University of Wisconsin - Madison
The Rational Roles of Experiences of Utterance Meanings.Berit Brogaard - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 4.
What We Know When We Know a Language.Barry C. Smith - 2005 - In Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 941.

Analytics

Added to PP
2023-04-28

Downloads
47 (#477,440)

6 months
12 (#325,295)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Citations of this work

Linguistic understanding: perception and inference.Anna Drożdżowicz & Kim Pedersen Phillips - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Truth-Conditional Pragmatics.François Recanati - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
What is inference?Paul Boghossian - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 169 (1):1-18.
On Quantifier Domain Restriction.Jason Stanley & Zoltán Gendler Szabó - 2000 - Mind and Language 15 (2-3):219--61.
Conversational Impliciture.Kent Bach - 1994 - Mind and Language 9 (2):124-162.
Conversational impliciture.Kent Bach - 2013 - In Maite Ezcurdia & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy. Peterborough, CA: Broadview Press. pp. 284.

View all 38 references / Add more references