Normative inferentialism on linguistic understanding

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to establish a specific view of linguistic understanding based on the framework of normative inferentialism. Normative inferentialism is presented as an overspecification (rich) account of meaning—the meaning of a sentence is understood as a cluster of context‐dependent contents. The standard psychological mechanism responsible for reaching understanding of an utterance depends on the ability to eliminate contextually irrelevant aspects/parts of meaning. The advantages of the view are that the mechanism can (a) explain a wide range of linguistic phenomena including polysemy, homonymy, and conversational implicatures, and (b) explain partial understanding of an utterance.

Understanding the other from an inferentialist perspective

“…To see how this norm works in practice, consider a conversation between two speakers, A and B . Let us denote a local norm of inferences within a conversation at time T as follows: LN A & B ,T ([< p >, q ], [< q >, r ]) (see Drobňák, 2020, 2021). Here, p , q and r represent propositions, and [< p >, q ] denotes the committive inferential pattern from p to q .…”

“…The individuation of contents based on it allows the participants to share the same contents, and attribute these to each other, even though neither has complete knowledge of the other's inferential network. Of course, since people endorse different inferential patterns and cannot capture all of them, we cannot fully understand each other in this sense (see Drobňák, 2021). However, we can talk about what the other asserts and believes, because what determines and individuates this is the common inferential background against which both the asserter and the hearer can position their different views.…”