Signs, communications and understanding

That one person can increase another's understanding \nof something by way of symbolic communication seems an \nuncontentious claim. More contentious is the claim that \nmuch epistemology and philosophy of language~ wh~lst \ngiving us formal expositions of the tr~th crlterla for \n'X knows that S' or the syntactic structure of language, \nfails to cast much light on the process of knowing, on \nwhat being an 'understanoer' consists in. \nI begin my thesis by looking at language acquisition, \nrejecting behaviourist/physicalist accounts and concluding \nthat we nust talk about the conceptual develop~ent of \nthe pre-linguistic child (involving coming to pick out \nand attach si~nificance to certain classes of objects \nof experience) if lanb~aGe acquisition is to be shown \nto be a possibility. ?ail~re to divorce concept possession \nfrom the possession of sophisticated linguistic skills, \nI arbUe, makes languaee acquisition inexplicable. I \naccept that language frequently plays an important part \nin establishing interpersonal agreement in conceptual \nframeworks/ways of looking, but not that talk of concept \npossession in the absence of linguistic skills is empty. \nThis leads on to the problem of meaning and I adopt \na 'speech acts' approach to this on the grounds that a \nDavidsonian theory of meaning cannot claim to explain \nhow linguistic signs are significant for us unless \nbacked up by behaviourist/physicalist claims of the sort \nQuine makes and which I reject. I look at the meaning \nof symbols in terms of the significance it has by virtue \nof agreement (within a form of life) on the appropriateness \nof their inscriptions for performing certain speech \nacts in certain contexts. \nI next move on to an account of uncerstanding, analysed \nin terms of the possession of a conceptual framework \nappropriate for the object of understanding. I reject \nboth relativist and strongly absolutist accounts of this \n'appropriate' ccncluding that we can only support a claim \nthat 'this' or 'that' ways of looking captures 'these' \naspects of the world if theory has implications, directly \nor indirectly, for our handling of relevant aspects of \nthe world. Utility is not written into understanding \nitself, rather it appears as the criterion by which we \ncan support the claim that a particular 'story' about \nthe world captures the way things are to some extent as \nopposed to being mere phantasy. In the course of this \ndiscussion I distinguish a number of problem domains in \nwhich specialists have found it appropriate to make \ndifferent metaphysical assumptions about the phenomena \nwith which we are dealing. \nThe thesis concludes by relating the issues discussed \nto both curriculum design and the problems of teaching.