Understanding a communicated thought
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Understanding a communicated thought J. Adam Carter1
· Emma C. Gordon1 · J. P. Grodniewicz2
Received: 7 March 2020 / Accepted: 1 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that the understanding one has of a proposition or a propositional content of a representational vehicle is a species of what contemporary epistemologists characterise as objectual understanding. Second, we demonstrate that even though this type of understanding differs from linguistic understanding, in many instances of successful communication, these two types of understanding jointly contribute to understanding a communicated thought. Keywords Propositional understanding · Linguistic understanding · Objectual understanding · Understanding and luck
1 Introduction Grigory Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture. As a competent English speaker, you understand what you have just read. You have read that Grigory Perelman proved
Author names are listed alphabetically and these authors contributed equally to this work.
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J. Adam Carter [email protected] Emma C. Gordon [email protected] J. P. Grodniewicz [email protected]
1
COGITO, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
2
LOGOS, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
123
Synthese
the Poincaré conjecture. We call this kind of understanding, however one would like to characterise it in detail,1 linguistic understanding. Linguistic understanding of a given utterance differs from understanding of a proposition expressed by this utterance.2 To understand the proposition Grigory Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture, it is not sufficient to recognize, that this is what utterances of the English sentence ‘Grigory Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture’ express in certain contexts. Prima facie, it seems plausible that Fields Medal recipient Terence Tao has a rich understanding of the proposition Grigory Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture, while a fourteen-year-old not particularly interested in mathematics—very minimal. Nevertheless, as competent English speakers, they would both agree that this is precisely what is said in the first sentence of the previous paragraph. There is clearly an epistemic difference between understanding a proposition and mere linguistic understanding. What is it? Epistemologists of understanding have by and large been inclined to set this question aside. For example, according to Stephen Grimm (2011), epistemologists seek to uncover the nature of understanding of the natural world (broadly understood), and little will be said about how—if at all—the approaches on offer here might relate, for example, to the kind of linguistic understanding we have of concepts or meanings… [because] the way in which we achieve understanding in these areas seems different enough that it deserves to be dealt with separately (2011, p. 84, our italics).3 We disagree. At least, we disagree with the thought that understanding what people tell us (broadly speaking) is interestingly unlike the kind of understand
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