•  
  •  
 

Abstract

How do we know what other speakers say? Perhaps the most natural view is that we hear a speaker's utterance and infer what was said, drawing on our competence in the syntax and semantics of the language. An alternative view that has emerged in the literature is that native speakers have a non-inferential capacity to perceive the content of speech. Call this the perceptual view. The disagreement here is best understood as an epistemological one about whether our knowledge of what speakers say is epistemically mediated by our linguistic competence. The present paper takes up the question of how we should go about settling this issue. Arguments for the perceptual view generally appeal to the phenomenology of speech comprehension. The present paper develops a line of argument for the perceptual view that draws on evidence from empirical psychology. The evidence suggests that a speaker's core syntactic and semantic competence is typically deployed sub-personally (e.g., by something like a module). The point is not just that the competence is tacit or unconscious, but that the person is not the locus of the competence. I argue that standing competence can enter into the grounds for knowledge only if it is subject to a certain sort of epistemic assessment, an assessment that is appropriate only if the person is the locus of that competence. If the person is not the locus of a speaker's core linguistic competence, as the psychological evidence suggests, then that competence does not enter into the grounds for our knowledge of what speakers say. If this line of argument is right, it has implications for the epistemology of perception and for our understanding of how empirical psychology bears on epistemology generally.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

References

Bar-On, D. 2004. ‘Semantic Eliminativism and the ‘Theory’-Theory of Linguistic Understanding’. In C. Viger, R. Stainton & M. Ezcurdia (eds.) ‘New Essays in Philosophy of Language and Mind’, University of Calgary Press.

Burge, T. 1993. ‘Content Preservation’. Philosophical Review 102: 457–488.
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2185680

Chomsky, N. 1984. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origins, and Use. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Cowie, F. 1999. What’s Within: Nativism Reconsidered. Oxford University Press, New York.

Davidson, D. 1937. ‘Radical Interpretation’. Dialectica 27. Reprinted in ‘Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation’ (pp. 125–140). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Davies, M. 1989. ‘Tacit Knowledge and Subdoxastic States’. In A. George (ed.) ‘Reflections on Chomsky’, 131–152. Oxford: Blackwell.

Dummett, M. 1978. ‘What Do I Know when I Know a Language?’ In ‘The Seas of Language’, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ellis, A. W. 1984. ‘Introduction to Byrom Bramwell’s (1897) Case of Word Meaning Deafness’. Cognitive Neuropsychology 1: 245–248.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02643298408252025

Evans, G. 1981. ‘Semantic Theory and Tacit Knowledge’. In S. Holtzman & C. Leich (eds.) ‘Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule’, 137–188. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Fodor, J. 1983. Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Franklin, S., Turner, J., Ralph, M. A. Lambon, Morris, J. & Bailey, P. J. 1996. ‘A Distinctive Case of Word Meaning Deafness?’ Cognitive Neuropsychology 13: 1139–1162.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/026432996381683

Fricker, E. 2003. ‘Understanding and Knowledge of What is Said’. In A. Barber (ed.) ‘Epistemology of Language’, 325–366. London: Oxford University Press.

Hall, D. A. & Riddoch, M. J. 1997. ‘Word Meaning Deafness: Spelling Words that are not Understood’. Cognitive Neuropsychology 14: 1131–1164.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/026432997381295

Heck, R. G. 2006. ‘Reason and Language’. In C. MacDonald (ed.) ‘McDowell and his Critics’, 22–44. Oxford: Blackwell.

Higginbotham, J. 1992. ‘Truth and Understanding’. Philosophical Studies 65: 3–16.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00571313

James, W. 1897. ‘The Will to Believe’. In ‘The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy’, 1–31. New York: Habnev.

Kohn, S. E. & Friedman, R. B. 1986. ‘Word-Meaning Deafness: A Phonological-Semantic Dissociation’. Cognitive Neuropsychology 3: 291–308.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02643298608253361

Longworth, G. 2008a. ‘Comprehending Speech’. Philosophical Perspectives, 22, Philosophy of Language 297–331.

Longworth, G. 2008b. ‘Linguistic Understanding and Knowledge’. Noûs 42: 50–79.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2007.00673.x

Longworth, G. 2010. ‘Some Models of Linguistic Understanding’. This volume.

Matthews, R. J. 2003. ‘Does Linguistic Competence Require Knowledge of Language?’ In A. Barber (ed.) ‘Epistemology of Language’, 187–213. London: Oxford University Press.

Matthews, R. J. 2006. ‘Knowledge of Language and Linguistic Competence’. Philosophical Issues 16: 200–220.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-6077.2006.00110.x

McGee, V. 1998. “Kilimanjaro”. Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Supplementary Volume 23: 141–163.

McNamara, T. P. 2005. Semantic Priming: Perspectives from Memory and Word Recognition. New York: Psychology Press.

Meyer, D. E. & Schvaneveldt, R. W. 1971. ‘Facilitation in Recognizing Pairs of Words: Evidence of a Dependence between Retrieval Operations’. Journal of Experimental Psychology 90 (2): 227–234.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0031564
PMid:5134329

Millikan, R. G. 2004. Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Pettit, D. 2001. ‘Understanding Language’. PhD dissertation, MIT.

Pettit, D. 2002. ‘Why Knowledge is Unnecessary for Understanding Language’. Mind 111: 519–550.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mind/111.443.519

Smith, B. C. 2009. ‘Speech Sounds and the Direct Meeting of Minds’. In M. Nudds & C. O’Callaghan (eds.) ‘Sounds: New Essays in Perception’, London: Oxford University Press.

Stanley, J. 2005. ‘Hornsby on the Phenomenology of Speech’. The Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 79: 131–46.

Download

Share

COinS