Is linguistic understanding a form of knowledge? I clarify the question and then consider two natural forms a positive answer might take. I argue that, although some recent arguments fail to decide the issue, neither positive answer should be accepted. The aim is not yet to foreclose on the view that linguistic understanding is a form of knowledge, but to develop desiderata on a satisfactory successor to the two natural views rejected here.

How much linguistic understanding is required for testimonial knowledge acquisition? One answer is that, so long as we grasp the content expressed by the speaker, it does not matter if our understanding of it is poor. Call this the ‘Liberal View’ of testimony. This approach looks especially promising when combined with the thesis that we share a public language that makes it easy to grasp the right content. In this paper, I argue that this picture is epistemically (...) problematic. Poor linguistic understanding undermines our ability to recognise evidence and counterevidence for the testimonial content. Because of this, in many cases in which a hearer’s understanding is poor, her resultant testimonial belief will lack sufficient warrant to qualify as knowledge. Given that we often do not possess a sufficiently good understanding of the testimony we consume, I argue that we acquire far less knowledge through testimony than the Liberal View suggests. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to establish a specific view of linguistic understanding based on the framework of normative inferentialism. Normative inferentialism is presented as an overspecification (rich) account of meaning—the meaning of a sentence is understood as a cluster of context‐dependent contents. The standard psychological mechanism responsible for reaching understanding of an utterance depends on the ability to eliminate contextually irrelevant aspects/parts of meaning. The advantages of the view are that the mechanism can (a) explain (...) a wide range of linguistic phenomena including polysemy, homonymy, and conversational implicatures, and (b) explain partial understanding of an utterance. (shrink)

The majority of our linguistic exchanges, such as everyday conversations, are divided into turns; one party usually talks at a time, with only relatively rare occurrences of brief overlaps in which there are two simultaneous speakers. Moreover, conversational turn-taking tends to be very fast. We typically start producing our responses before the previous turn has finished, i.e., before we are confronted with the full content of our interlocutor’s utterance. This raises interesting questions about the nature of linguistic (...) class='Hi'>understanding. Philosophical theories typically focus on linguistic understanding characterized either as an ability to grasp the contents of utterances in a given language or as outputs of this ability—mental states of one type or another. In this paper, I supplement these theories by developing an account of the process of understanding. I argue that it enables us to capture the dynamic and temporal aspect of understanding and reconcile philosophical investigations with empirical research on language comprehension. (shrink)

Comment on Dean Pettit, who replies in same issue.

The nature of linguistic understanding is a much-debated topic. Among the issues that have been discussed, two questions have recently received a lot of attention: (Q1) ‘Are states of understanding direct (i.e. represent solely what is said) or indirect (i.e. represent what is said as being said/asserted)?’ and (Q2) ‘What kind of mental attitude is linguistic understanding (e.g. knowledge, belief, seeming)?’ This paper argues that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, there is no straightforward answer (...) to either of these questions. This is because linguistic understanding cannot be identified with a single mental attitude towards a particular representation. Instead, we should characterize states of linguistic understanding as involving complex representational structures generated by a dual-stream process. The first stream operates on direct representations of what is said, while the second operates on representations of what is said as being said/asserted by a given source. Both these streams feed a situation model, i.e. a complex representation of a state of affairs described by a given piece of discourse. (shrink)

Leclerc-Andre_Spontaneous-linguistic-understanding.

Current understanding of the nature of language owes much to two authors: Noam Chomsky and the later Wittgenstein. What is interesting is that the conceptions of language proposed by each appear to conflict. The key question is: what is it to understand a language? In these terms, the internalist/individualist view of linguistic understanding which Chomsky has consistently advocated throughout his career appears to flatly contradict the later Wittgenstein's externalist account of linguistic understanding . In short, (...) the relation between these two conceptions is not well-understood. 2 The aim of this paper is to establish some rapprochement along the following lines: philosophy of language may be the richer for what it can learn from empirical linguistics but that area of philosophy remains the context within which empirical linguistics derives its significance. (shrink)

What do you know when you know what a sentence means? According to some theories, understanding a sentence is, in part, knowing its truth-conditions. Dorit Bar-On, Claire Horisk, and William Lycan have defended such theories on the grounds of an “epistemic determination argument”. That argument turns on the ideas that understanding a sentence, along with knowledge of the non-linguistic facts, suffices to know its truth-value, and that being able to determine a sentence’s truth-value given knowledge of the (...) non-linguistic facts is knowing its truth-conditions. I argue that the EDA withstands the objections recently raised by Daniel Cohnitz and Jaan Kangilaski, but fails for other reasons. It equivocates between a fine-grained and a coarse grained conception of “facts.”. (shrink)

Language understanding comes with a particular kind of phenomenology. It is often observed that when listening to utterances in a familiar language, competent language users can have experiences of understanding the meanings of these utterances. The nature of such experiences is a much debated topic. In this paper, I develop a new proposal according to which experiences of understanding are a particular kind of epistemic feelings of fluency that result from evaluative monitoring processes. The perceptual experience that (...) accompanies linguistic comprehension results from the deployment of early stage auditory processes of speech perception that lead to the recognition of words. (shrink)

This paper examines an insoluble Cartesian problem for classical AI, namely, how linguistic understanding involves knowledge and awareness of u’s meaning, a cognitive process that is irreducible to algorithms. As analyzed, Descartes’ view about reason and intelligence has paradoxically encouraged certain classical AI researchers to suppose that linguistic understanding suffices for machine intelligence. Several advocates of the Turing Test, for example, assume that linguistic understanding only comprises computational processes which can be recursively decomposed into (...) algorithmic mechanisms. Against this background, in the first section, I explain Descartes’ view about language and mind. To show that Turing bites the bullet with his imitation game, in the second section I analyze this method to assess intelligence. Then, in the third section, I elaborate on Schank and Abelsons’ Script Applier Mechanism (SAM, hereby), which supposedly casts doubt on Descartes’ denial that machines can think. Finally, in the fourth section, I explore a challenge that any algorithmic decomposition of linguistic understanding faces. This challenge, I argue, is the core of the Cartesian problem: knowledge and awareness of meaning require a first-person viewpoint which is irreducible to the decomposition of algorithmic mechanisms. (shrink)

Traditionally, the language faculty was supposed to be a device that maps linguistic inputs to semantic or conceptual representations. These representations themselves were supposed to be distinct from the representations manipulated by the hearer.s perceptual and motor systems. Recently this view of language has been challenged by advocates of embodied cognition. Drawing on empirical studies of linguistic comprehension, they have proposed that the language faculty reuses the very representations and processes deployed in perceiving and acting. I review some (...) of the evidence in favor of the embodied view of language comprehension, and argue that none of it is conclusive. Moreover, the embodied view itself blurs two important distinctions: first, the distinction between linguistic comprehension and its typical consequences; and second, the distinction between representational content and vehicles. Given that these distinctions are well-motivated, we have good reason to reject the embodied view of linguistic understanding. (shrink)

I discuss the conjecture that understanding what is said in an utterance is to be modelled as knowing what is said in that utterance. My main aim is to present a number of alter- native models, as a prophylactic against premature acceptance of the conjecture as the only game in town. I also offer preliminary assessments of each of the models, including the propositional knowledge model, in part by considering their respective capacities to sub-serve the transmission of knowledge through (...) testimony. In each case, the preliminary assessment is unfavourable. I end by very briefly sketching an additional model as an object for future consideration. (shrink)

In this article, I develop a loosely Wittgensteinian conception of what it takes for a being, including an AI system, to understand language, and I suggest that current state of the art systems are closer to fulfilling these requirements than one might think. Developing and defending this claim has both empirical and conceptual aspects. The conceptual aspects concern the criteria that are reasonably applied when judging whether some being understands language; the empirical aspects concern the question whether a given being (...) fulfills these criteria. On the conceptual side, the article builds on Glock’s concept of intelligence, Taylor’s conception of intrinsic rightness as well as Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. On the empirical side, it is argued that current transformer-based NNLP models, such as BERT and GPT-3 come close to fulfilling these criteria. (shrink)

Suppose, familiarly, that you and a friend have landed in an alien territory, amidst people who speak a language you do not know. Upon seeing you, one of them starts yelling, seemingly alarmed. You say to your friend, “She thinks we want to hurt her. She's scared. We must seem very strange to her.” Your friend, who is facing you, says, “No, I think she's actually trying to warn you: there's a snake right above your head, on that tree. You (...) see the sling in her hand? I think she's going to try to shoot it down.“On a prevalent view, much discussed in recent years, you and your friend have engaged in a mini-theoretical enterprise. Using certain observations of the alien's behaviour as your data, and deploying certain generalizations and principles concerning human behaviour, you advance hypotheses regarding the internal psychological states which issued in her observed behaviour. (shrink)

En el contexto de este artículo denominaremos mentalismo a la conjunción de dos tesis diferentes: (i) para que las expresiones lingüísticas tengan significado es necesario que haya entidades de carácter mental; (ii) tales entidades mentales son suficientes para fijar el significado de las expresiones correspondientes (es decir, lo determinan). Es característico deI segundo Wittgenstein el rechazo a ambas tesis. Pero son sus argumentos contra (ii), especialmente a partir de las consideraciones sobre seguir una regla, los que han concentrado casi toda (...) la atención. En este trabajo presento el argumento principal de Wittgentein contra (i), diferenciándolo de sus objeciones a (ii).In this article mentalism will be used to denominate the conjunction of two thesis: (i) it is a necessary condition for linguistic expressions having meaning the existence of mental entities; (ii) these mental entities are sufficient to fix the meaning of the corresponding expressions (they determine it). The two thesis are rejected by the later Wittgenstein. Most of the attention, though, has been paid to his arguments against (ii), especially based on discussions of rule-following. In this paper I work out Wittgenstein’s main argument against (i), and I distinguish it from his objections to (ii). (shrink)

It is a common wisdom that linguistic communication is different from linguistic understanding. However, the distinction between communication and understanding is not as clear as it seems to be. It is argued that the relationship between linguistic communication and understanding depends upon the notions of understanding and communication involved. Thinking along the line of propositional understanding and informative communication, communication can be reduced to mutual understanding. In contrast, operating along the line (...) of hermeneutic understanding and dialogical communication, the process of understanding is in essence a process of communication. However, dialogical communication should not be confused with propositional understanding. Conversely, hermeneutic understanding should not be confused with informative communication either. The former is dialogical in nature while the latter is monological. (shrink)

En el contexto de este artículo denominaremos mentalismo a la conjunción de dos tesis diferentes: (i) para que las expresiones lingüísticas tengan significado es necesario que haya entidades de carácter mental; (ii) tales entidades mentales son suficientes para fijar el significado de las expresiones correspondientes (es decir, lo determinan). Es característico deI segundo Wittgenstein el rechazo a ambas tesis. Pero son sus argumentos contra (ii), especialmente a partir de las consideraciones sobre seguir una regla, los que han concentrado casi toda (...) la atención. En este trabajo presento el argumento principal de Wittgentein contra (i), diferenciándolo de sus objeciones a (ii).In this article mentalism will be used to denominate the conjunction of two thesis: (i) it is a necessary condition for linguistic expressions having meaning the existence of mental entities; (ii) these mental entities are sufficient to fix the meaning of the corresponding expressions (they determine it). The two thesis are rejected by the later Wittgenstein. Most of the attention, though, has been paid to his arguments against (ii), especially based on discussions of rule-following. In this paper I work out Wittgenstein’s main argument against (i), and I distinguish it from his objections to (ii). (shrink)

This collection of work addresses the contribution that ethnography and linguistics make to education, and the contribution that research in education makes to anthropology and linguistics.; The first section of the book pinpoints characteristics of anthropology that most make a difference to research in education. The second section describes the perspective that is needed if the study of language is to contribute adequately to problems of education and inequality. Finally, the third section takes up discoveries about narrative, which show that (...) young people's narratives may have a depth of form and skill that has gone largely unrecognized. (shrink)

Vague language and corresponding models of inference and information processing is an important and challenging topic as witnessed by a number of recent monographs and collections of essays devoted to the topic. This volume collects fifteen papers, the majority of which originated with talks presented at the conference "Logical Models of Reasoning with Vague Information ", September 14-17, 2009, in Čejkovice, that initiated a EUROCORES/LogICCC project with the same title. At least two features set the current volume apart from other (...) texts: first, the interdisciplinary nature of the topic is nicely reflected by the wide range of interests of the authors, who include philosophers, linguists, logicians, as well as mathematicians and computer scientists. Secondly, all the papers are accompanied by comments written by other authors and a few outside experts. These comments and corresponding replies by the authors document the very lively ongoing debate on adequate models of vague language. (shrink)

What is it to understand a sentence of a language? This question lies at the very heart of philosophy of language due to its intimate connections with two other issues: the nature of linguistic meaning and the workings of linguistic communication. This book presents a systematic attempt to explicate the concept of sentence understanding, guided by two questions: What exactly is the role played by states of sentence understanding in enabling linguistic communication? And what do (...) such states have to be in order to play that role? Adopting a broadly Gricean picture of communication as background, the book reviews some main proposals from the literature and then develops an original line of Argument for a non-standard version of the view that understanding a sentence consists in possessing propositional knowledge of its meaning. A key to a satisfactory account of this sort, it is argued, lies in a particular view of the nature of propositional attitude states. Apart from dealing successfully with a number of challenges, the resulting account also forms part of an attractive general picture of how philosophers of language may go about explaining our use and interpretation of language. (shrink)

Many despair at trying to understand something’s meaning and express dissatisfaction with language wholesale. What if some things simply are not understandable? Thich Nhat Hanh coined interbeing to name the fundamental principle of interdependence defining Buddhist ontologies, and uses interbeing to dislodge despair resulting from rigid expectations of how things must be. Thich also criticized a standard view of language as generating those rigid expectations. Drawing upon classical humanist traditions, Hans-Georg Gadamer promoted a hermeneutics whereby interpreters overcome existential alienation. In (...) his theory of understanding meaning, Gadamer rehabilitated language as having its being in revealing aspects of truth. By situating Gadamer’s hermeneutics within Thich’s interbeing, I develop limits of understanding that facilitate freedom from despair about meaning and language. Thich and Gadamer both taught that the quest for stability within change is misguided. This requires rigorous attention to the limits of understanding. Attention to these limits serves to liberate people from clinging to the illusion that all things are understandable and despair accompanying the incapacity to understand some things. (shrink)

The uncertainty associated with paradigmatic families has been shown to correlate with their phonetic characteristics in speech, suggesting that representations of complex sublexical relations between words are part of speaker knowledge. To better understand this, recent studies have used two-layer neural network models to examine the way paradigmatic uncertainty emerges in learning. However, to date this work has largely ignored the way choices about the representation of inflectional and grammatical functions in models strongly influence what they subsequently learn. To explore (...) the consequences of this, we investigate how representations of IFS in the input-output structures of learning models affect the capacity of uncertainty estimates derived from them to account for phonetic variability in speech. Specifically, we examine whether IFS are best represented as outputs to neural networks or as inputs by building models that embody both choices and examining their capacity to account for uncertainty effects in the formant trajectories of word final [ɐ], which in German discriminates around sixty different IFS. Overall, we find that formants are enhanced as the uncertainty associated with IFS decreases. This result dovetails with a growing number of studies of morphological and inflectional families that have shown that enhancement is associated with lower uncertainty in context. Importantly, we also find that in models where IFS serve as inputs—as our theoretical analysis suggests they ought to—its uncertainty measures provide better fits to the empirical variance observed in [ɐ] formants than models where IFS serve as outputs. This supports our suggestion that IFS serve as cognitive cues during speech production, and should be treated as such in modeling. It is also consistent with the idea that when IFS serve as inputs to a learning network. This maintains the distinction between those parts of the network that represent message and those that represent signal. We conclude by describing how maintaining a “signal-message-uncertainty distinction” can allow us to reconcile a range of apparently contradictory findings about the relationship between articulation and uncertainty in context. (shrink)

Empirical insights into language processing have a philosophical relevance that extends well beyond philosophical questions about language. This chapter will discuss this wider relevance: We will consider how experimental philosophers can examine language processing in order to address questions in several different areas of philosophy. To do so, we will present the emerging research program of experimental argument analysis (EAA) that examines how automatic language processing shapes verbal reasoning – including philosophical arguments. The evidential strand of experimental philosophy uses mainly (...) questionnaire-based methods to assess the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments that are adduced as evidence for philosophical theories and as premises for philosophical arguments. Extending this prominent strand of experimental philosophy, EAA underpins such assessments, extends the scope of the assessments, and expands the range of the empirical methods employed: EAA examines how automatic inferences that are continually made in language comprehension and production shape verbal reasoning, and draws on findings about comprehension biases that affect the contextualisation of such default inferences, in order to explain and expose fallacies. It deploys findings to assess premises and inferences from premises to conclusions, in philosophical arguments. To do so, it adapts methods from psycholinguistics and recruits methods from computational linguistics. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the manner in which the protester’s opposition, or what I consider as the protester’s being-there-against, “profiles” itself in the no-man’s-land between non-violence and violence. My focus is therefore to unfold some of its constitutive layers, relying on the conceptual tools prominently provided by Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology. The first constitutive layer concerns the protester’s bodily presence, seized first of all as a specific “here” and “there,” and then as an expressive body that is communicating through gestures. (...) Within the interpretation of one of these gestures—the fist raised in the air—I highlight the anamnestic nature of the protester’s being-there-against as it appears in the relationship with a state whose legitimacy comes from taking over the monopoly on violence. The second constitutive layer is related to the linguistic dimension of the protester’s presence: here special attention is paid to the way language and violence connect, having as background an analysis devoted to the surplus and the deficit of meaning attached to the slogans chanted by the protesters. (shrink)

Although the linguistic turn is usually described in historical terms this article aims at combing the significant historical transitions with systematic philosophical considerations. Against the background of earlier rationalistic and empiricist trends particular attention is given to the successive epistemic ideals manifest in the conceptual rationalism of the Enlightenment, followed by the historicism of the 19th century and subsequently by the linguistic turn . An assessment of these transitions will explore systematic issues, in particular the relationship between universality (...) and what is individual , the difference between functional laws and type laws , and regarding the limits of concept formation the distinction between conceptual knowledge and concept-transcending knowledge . This distinction enables the introduction of a new understanding of the difference between rationalism and irrationalism . Apart from Dilthey the linguistic turn penetrated also the thought of thinkers such as Freud, Wittgenstein, Frankl, Heidegger, Habermas, Dooyeweerd and Gadamer, all of them (implicitly or explicitly) elaborated the initial criticism raised by Herder, Jacobi, Hamann, Heidegger and Gadamer against Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason for neglecting language. After briefly referring to the connection between the linguistic turn and the idea of the meaningful construction of reality, the article ends with a concluding remark emphasizing the fact that no single concept-transcending usage of modal (aspectual) terms should be elevated above others or employed at the cost of other equally legitimate idea-statements. (shrink)

THIS PAPER ATTEMPTS TO PROVIDE A SYSTEMATIC CHARACTERIZATION OF THE UNDERSTANDING PRESUPPOSED BY PROPOSITIONAL KNOWLEDGE. BEGINNING WITH THE HYPOTHESIS THAT THE UNDERSTANDING UNDERLYING KNOWLEDGE IS LINGUISTIC IN NATURE, A HYPOTHESIS I CALL "LT," I STATE AND CRITICIZE DANTO'S VERSION OF LT, WHICH ANALYZES THIS UNDERSTANDING AS THE UNDERSTANDING OF SENTENCES. I SHOW THAT HIS (INTELLECTUALIZED) VIEW OF WHAT IT IS TO UNDERSTAND LANGUAGE IS INCORRECT. BY DISTINGUISHING A COMPETENCE FROM A PERFORMANCE SENSE OF "UNDERSTANDS "S"," (...) AND BY NOTING THAT LANGUAGE FORMS A SYSTEM, I SHOW THAT WE MUST REPLACE SENTENCE UNDERSTANDING WITH KNOWLEDGE OF RULES OF LANGUAGE. (shrink)

The author considers a problem of understanding. He claims that we understand texts, cultural objects rather than a man. He considers understanding as a process of interpretation of linguistic expressions and cultural objects. The author observes two sides of the meaning of linguistic expressions: a general (or social) one, which is common in a certain language community, and a personal one, which defines personal understanding. It is argued that mutual understanding is possible only on (...) the stage of general meaning. However, the exchange of personal meanings is a very sophisticated process. (shrink)

Ascriptions of content are sensitive not only to our physical and social environment, but also to unforeseeable developments in the subsequent usage of our terms. This paper argues that the problems that may seem to come from endorsing such 'temporally sensitive' ascriptions either already follow from accepting the socially and historically sensitive ascriptions Burge and Kripke appeal to, or disappear when the view is developed in detail. If one accepts that one's society's past and current usage contributes to what one's (...) terms mean, there is little reason not to let its future usage to do so as well. (shrink)

Because Gadamer is very sensitive to the role of history, tradition and authority within human life, the overall intention of this article will be to unveil major elements of modern philosophy which exerted an influence upon his thought. In this sense it can be seen as applying his notion of 'Wirkungsgeschichte' to an assessment of certain aspects of his own thought. Particularly in his view on causality and history Gadamer illustrates the intimate connection of his thought with the dialectics of (...) nature and freedom. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.21(4) 2002: 291-305. (shrink)

Delusions have traditionally been considered the hallmark of mental illness, and their conception, diagnosis and treatment raise many of the fundamental conceptual and practical questions of psychopathology. One of these fundamental questions is whether delusions are understandable. In this paper, we propose to consider the question of understandability of delusions from a philosophy of language perspective. For this purpose, we frame the question of how delusions can be understood as a question about the meaning of delusional utterances. Accordingly, we ask: (...) “what meaning(s) can delusional utterances possibly have?”. We argue that in the current literature, there is a standard approach to the meaning of delusional utterances, namely the descriptive account which assumes that a delusional utterance “p” means that p is the case. Drawing on Speech Act Theory, we argue that solely relying on the descriptive account disregards essential ways of how linguistic meaning is constituted. Further, we show that Speech Act Theory can prove a helpful addition to the theoretical and clinical “toolbox” used for attempting to understand delusional utterances. This, we believe, may address some of the theoretical and clinical shortcomings of using only the currently predominant descriptive account. (shrink)

: This essay investigates why and how East Asian thought, particularly Chinese thought, has traditionally developed differently from that of Western philosophy by examining the linguistic differences discerned in the Chinese language and Western languages. To accomplish this task, it focuses on the understanding of "being" that relates to the theoretical thinking of the West and the image-thinking of East Asia, while providing a psychological basis for the latter.

This essay investigates why and how East Asian thought, particularly Chinese thought, has traditionally developed differently from that of Western philosophy by examining the linguistic differences discerned in the Chinese language and Western languages. To accomplish this taks, it focuses on the understanding of "being" that relates to the theoretical thinking of the West and the image-thinking of East Asia, while providing a psychological basis for the latter.

This essay investigates why and how East Asian thought, particularly Chinese thought, has traditionally developed differently from that of Western philosophy by examining the linguistic differences discerned in the Chinese language and Western languages. To accomplish this taks, it focuses on the understanding of "being" that relates to the theoretical thinking of the West and the image- thinking of East Asia, while providing a psychological basis for the latter.