According to the Epistemic View on language understanding, to understand a bit of language (a word, a sentence, a phrase) one has to know its meaning. This view, taken for a long time as a default stance in philosophy of language, has been recently criticized by several philosophers including Pettit (2002). Pettit offers a Gettier-style argument aiming to show that it is possible to understand a word without having knowledge of its meaning. The paper has two goals. First, I discuss and dismiss a counterexmaple offered by Green (2010) against Pettit's case. Second, I provide my own criticism of Pettit's case. It is based on the observation that in Pettit's scenario the speaker learns a new word in a second language as a translation of a well known word of her native language.
Activities > Graduate Research Seminar (GRSem) > Can we gettierize language understanding?
