Themes in linguistic understanding cognition and epistemology

• Autores: Jedrzej Piotr Grodniewicz
• Directores de la Tesis: Manuel García-Carpintero (dir. tes.), Josep Macià Fàbrega (codir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat de Barcelona ( España ) en 2020
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Sanford G. Golberg (presid.), Josefa Toribio Mateas (secret.), Peter Graham (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia Cognitiva y Lenguaje por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona; la Universidad de Barcelona y la Universidad Rovira i Virgili
• Materias:
  • Filosofía
    • Filosofía del conocimiento
      • Epistemología
      • Teoría de la razón
    • Antropología filosófica
      • Filosofía del lenguaje
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• Resumen

  • This thesis investigates the nature and epistemic role of linguistic understanding. It consists of five largely autonomous chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the dynamic and temporal aspect of linguistic understanding. It argues that linguistic understanding can be appropriately characterized as a process and offers such a characterization. Chapter 2 argues that the process of language comprehension generates multiple interdependent representations (and metarepresentations). Only by taking into account all these representations and relations between them, we will be able to describe how linguistic understanding contributes to our acquisition of beliefs and knowledge. Chapter 3 argues that the justification of comprehension-based beliefs, i.e., the beliefs about what other people say, is non-inferential. In particular, it defends a version of process-reliabilism about the justification of comprehension-based beliefs. Chapter 4 examines the effectiveness of the filtering of information we acquire through comprehension. It argues that the filtering is not real- time effective, but it is long-term effective; it does not allow a particular hearer on a particular occasion to respond discriminately to a particular instance of testimony, but it shapes our social environment in such a way that untrustworthy testimony is relatively uncommon. As a result, the chapter supports a version of strong anti-reductionism about testimonial entitlement. Finally, Chapter 5 argues that linguistic understanding differs from the so-called understanding of a proposition. The latter is a kind of what contemporary epistemologists characterize as objectual understanding. Nevertheless, in most cases of successful linguistic communication, linguistic understanding, and understanding of a proposition jointly contribute to understanding a communicated thought.