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.
Highlights
Objectual understanding and understanding of a proposition fail to come apart. This concludes our argument for the Stronger thesis: the kind of understanding we aim to have of propositions is type-identical to the kind of understanding-as-grasping that contemporary epistemologists call objectual understanding
Since one of the main roles of propositions is “to be the meanings of sentences, or at least the contents expressible by sentences” (Collins 2018, p. 3) it is fairly easy to confuse the type of understanding relation we have to propositions with what is commonly discussed in philosophy of language under the label linguistic understanding
We argued that the understanding one has of a proposition or a propositional content of a representational vehicle is a type of what contemporary epistemologists characterize as objectual understanding
Summary
We call this kind of understanding, one would like to characterise it in detail, linguistic understanding. 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 interested in mathematics—very minimal. There is clearly an epistemic difference between understanding a proposition and mere linguistic understanding. 2, we briefly outline some of the key epistemic features of what epistemologists call objectual understanding—e.g., the kind of understanding one might have of a subject matter, such as football or geometry, and how this is typically thought to differ from (mere) propositional knowledge possession.. The two types of understanding are closely related; as we argue in Sect. 5, they jointly, and indispensably, contribute to what we call understanding a communicated thought, an important species of understanding that is distinct from, but consists of, both
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