Abstract

I agree completely with Devitt, first, that people do immediately understand sentences presented to them, that this understanding goes together with perceiveing the sentence in question, and that it demands an explanation. Devitt himself stresses the involvement of competence in the process, and I agree. But, if the competence is involved,, why is voice-of-competence view on the wrong track? And the view connects well with findings reported in psycholinguistic literature. Of course, there are several very broad areas that are sufficiently specific to allow for hypothesis of a specialized competence and about which people have intuitions. One is human general understanding of number that is quite specialized, and can be lost, as a consequence of brain damage, without impairment in other areas. The next is our spatial competence, presumably producing our spatial-geometrical intuitions. Coming closer to the domain of philosophy, there are several normative areas, the paradigmatic one being the moral domain. The voice-of-competence view can and should be generalized to all of them.