Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to answer the following question that falls in the intersection of philosophy of language and epistemology: is there any distinctive kind of knowledge that one might possess, merely in virtue of being a native, competent speaker of a certain natural language? When this is expressed as a question specifically about meaning, intuitions may support an affirmative answer. Philosophers of language often emphasize that human language use is essentially a rational activity and as such it must be rationally controlled by what speakers know about meaning; and competent speakers are often expected to be able to rationalize their choice of words by stating what they take the meanings of relevant words to be. At the same time, however, plausible empirical views of semantic competence tell us that speakers’ semantic competence is not in general a matter of possessing reflectively accessible propositional knowledge about meaning; rather, it consists in their knowing how (i.e. possessing practical skills/abilities) to meaningfully use linguistic expressions for various purposes. Semantic competence then may seem to resemble purely practical skills such as knowing how to ride a bicycle, or play a musical instrument. In this dissertation, I propose and defend an account of competent speakers’ reflective knowledge of meaning that can reconcile these potentially conflicting views. I argue that the most fruitful approach to this issue is to accept the plausible empirical claim that semantic competence does not in general require reflectively accessible propositional knowledge of meaning, and then show how competent speakers might still derive propositional knowledge of meaning from their semantic competence alone. To show this, I defend a pragmatist thesis that the derivation of knowledge from competence is made possible to competent speakers in virtue of their ability to perform what I call acts of meaning explication. Acts of meaning explication are acts that speakers can, in virtue of their semantic competence alone, perform by using linguistic expressions to express their (potentially tacit) conceptions of meaning. I argue that competent speakers can form reliably true beliefs about the meanings of linguistic expressions in their vocabularies by performing various acts of meaning explication.