(Non-)Conceptual Representation of Meaning in Utterance Comprehension

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming)
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Abstract

Many views of utterance comprehension agree that understanding an utterance involves knowing, believing, perceiving, or, anyhow, mentally representing the utterance to mean such-and-such. They include cognitivist as well as many perceptualist views; I give them the generic label ‘representationalist’. Representationalist views have been criticized for placing an undue metasemantic demand on utterance comprehension, viz. that speakers be able to represent meaning as meaning. Critics have adverted to young speakers, say about the age of three, who do comprehend many utterances but may be rather limited in their abilities to think about meaning as such, to cast doubt on this demand. This paper motivates representationalism, examines what the balance of developmental evidence and arguments shows, and identifies options for a representationalist response. Though there is some evidence that three-year-olds have limited abilities to think about meaning as such, they may yet turn out to have a concept of meaning, or at least some proto-semantic concept. Moreover, even if they lack any such concept, there is, I propose, a way of developing representationalism, drawing inspiration from Davidson’s paratactic view of indirect speech reports, on which meaning can be non-conceptually represented. Independently of developmental considerations, this paratactic-style proposal is of interest to friends of a perceptualist view of comprehension.

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Citations of this work

Is there an empirical case for semantic perception?Steven Gross - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (10):3770-3795.
Linguistic understanding: perception and inference.Anna Drożdżowicz & Kim Pedersen Phillips - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use.Noam Chomsky - 1986 - Prager. Edited by Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel.
The logical basis of metaphysics.Michael Dummett - 1991 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Logical Investigations.Edmund Husserl - 1970 - London, England: Routledge. Edited by Dermot Moran.

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