Utterance Understanding, Knowledge, and Belief

Abstract

What is it to understand another speaker’s utterance? A natural view is that such understanding requires at least the acquisition of propositional knowledge of the utterance’s meaning. This view is challenged by cases in which it correctly seems to a hearer H as though an utterance means such-and-such, but where H doesn’t form the belief that it means such-and-such due to a misleading defeater. Such cases have been claimed to be examples of understanding without belief, and a fortiori of understanding without knowledge. The paper examines this argument in detail and defends a mixed verdict: While the argument succeeds in showing that there is a reading of attributions of utterance understanding on which the natural view is false, such attributions also have a different reading on which the natural view may well be true for all the argument shows. In making the case for the second half of this claim, the paper gives center stage to the close intuitive connection between utterance understanding and communicative success.

1. Introduction

When we talk to each other in everyday life, we pursue many goals. We want to share or acquire information, convince, impress, or get others to do something. But there is one thing we almost always aim at when we talk to someone, no matter which further goals we are pursuing: We want those we are addressing to understand what we are saying. But exactly what does this amount to? What is it for someone to understand an utterance?

There is something like a default view concerning the nature of utterance understanding, which is both natural and arguably taken for granted by many theorists.[1] This view, which I’ll label (UK), says that understanding an utterance requires coming to know its meaning; that is, coming to know the meaning of an utterance is a necessary condition for understanding it. Not only does (UK) have an almost truistic flavor, there are also quite a few things that can be said in its favor (Longworth 2008: 52­­–54). Despite this, (UK) has been challenged with a number of different arguments. This paper focuses on one of these challenges, which has been presented most explicitly by David Hunter (1998) and Elizabeth Fricker (2003).[2] The argument draws attention to a class of cases that allegedly constitute counterexamples to (UK). The cases are ones where it correctly seems to a subject as though a speaker is saying such-and-such—this being the result of the normal and automatic exercise of the subject’s linguistic competence in response to the speaker’s utterance—but where the subject doesn’t form the belief that the speaker is saying such-and-such due to a misleading defeater. In such cases, the proponents of the argument claim, we intuitively judge that the relevant subject understands the utterance. Therefore, they conclude, utterance understanding doesn’t require forming a belief as to the utterance’s meaning; and since knowledge requires belief, utterance understanding doesn’t require coming to know its meaning either.[3] Since this line of argument is the main target of the present paper, I call it TAR for short. I call the examples on which it relies the target cases.

So far, the challenge posed to (UK) by TAR hasn’t been carefully evaluated.[4] The primary goal of this paper is to fill this gap. I will argue that the right verdict on TAR is a mixed one: TAR is successful to the extent that it shows that there is a reading of attributions of utterance understanding on which (UK) is false; but there is also a different reading of such attributions, and TAR does nothing to show that (UK) is false when construed in accordance with this second reading. My defense of the second half of this claim draws crucially on an intuitive connection between utterance understanding and communicative success which has often been noted in the literature on speech acts and linguistic communication.

The structure of the paper is as follows. In Section 2 (UK) is stated more carefully and clarified in a number of respects. Section 3 offers a reconstruction of TAR and explains the motivation of its proponents. Next, in Section 4, I look at two responses to TAR which have been suggested in the literature and argue that both are ultimately unsatisfactory. In Section 5 I present the case for what I take to be right response to TAR, and Section 6 replies to some objections. Section 7 concludes by noting the implications of my verdict on TAR for the debate about (UK).

2. Clarifying the Target Thesis

Above, (UK) was characterized as the view that a necessary condition for understanding an utterance is coming to know its meaning. To clarify the intended claim, more must be said about (i) the notion of understanding that is at issue and (ii) the notion of knowledge involved. I start with the former.

The notion of utterance understanding hides a number of complexities, and so pinning down the intended notion requires some care. First, we are concerned with the understanding of utterances qua datable events or acts, that is, utterance tokens (as opposed to utterance types). We are not concerned with what is often called dispositional understanding, that is, the kind of standing understanding one has of the expressions (qua types) of a language.

Secondly, we are concerned with utterance understanding as a matter of understanding the meaning of an utterance, as opposed to merely hearing and making out the sounds or words uttered by a speaker. More specifically, I follow Fricker (2003) in focusing on the notion of understanding the (intended)[5] illocutionary force and content of an utterance.[6] This is clearly one thing we often get at when we talk about “understanding an utterance” and “understanding what a speaker said” in everyday contexts, and for the rest of this paper these locutions are to be disambiguated accordingly.

Third, the notion of understanding we are concerned with is a success notion, which needs to be distinguished from its success-neutral counterpart. To see the contrast, compare claims of the following forms:

The success notion of understanding is the one present in claims of form (1): Such claims entail that H understood S’s utterance correctly, that H got the meaning of S’s utterance right. In contrast, claims of form (2) and (3) involve the success-neutral notion. Such claims do not imply that H understood the utterance correctly, as shown by the fact that they leave it open that H misunderstood S’s utterance.[7]

It is worth noting that the target cases threaten not only (UK), which features the success-notion of understanding, but also a closely related view concerning success-neutral understanding, namely, the view that understanding an utterance to have a certain meaning requires coming to believe that it has that meaning.[8] To keep the discussion from getting overly complex, however, I will bracket success-neutral understanding in this paper and focus only on the success notion. Suffice it to say that the response to TAR I advocate in Section 5 can be extended to cover the view that success-neutral understanding requires belief.

There is a final distinction relevant for our purposes. The verb “to understand” exhibits an ambiguity between an achievement sense and a state sense, which also shows up in the context of attributions of utterance understanding (Vendler 1967: 112–113; Longworth 2008: 50–51; 2010: 3–4). In the state-sense, to understand an utterance is to be in the state of understanding it. In the achievement-sense, it is to achieve understanding of the utterance, that is, to come to be in the state of understanding it, possibly as a result of a particular kind of process or episode. To illustrate, assume I’ve just heard and understood someone’s utterance. In this situation, I might say both “I understood what she just said” and “I understand what she just said”. The salient interpretation of the first sentence corresponds to the achievement sense, that of the second to the state sense.

As I have characterized it, (UK) concerns achievement-understanding: It says that understanding an utterance requires coming to know its meaning (achievement). But it’s again worth noting that there’s a close cousin of (UK) concerning state-understanding that is also threatened by the target cases, namely, the view that understanding an utterance U requires knowing the force and content of U (state). I focus on (UK) because the salient interpretation of attributions of utterance understanding normally involves the achievement sense, whereas evoking the state sense requires some extra stage setting. But once again nothing hinges on this way of setting the focus.[9]

Let’s turn to the notion of knowledge that figures in (UK). In light of what has been said, we might formulate (UK) as the claim that x understands the force and content of an utterance U only if x comes to know U’s force and content. What bears stressing now is that the kind of knowledge at issue is propositional knowledge. Properly understood, knowing the force and content of an utterance amounts to knowing what force and content the utterance has, which in turn amounts to knowing that the utterance has such-and-such force and content.[10] Making this explicit we can state (UK) thus:

For instance, understanding an utterance in which the speaker asserts that p requires coming to know that the speaker has asserted that p in making the utterance; understanding an utterance in which the speaker asks whether q requires coming to know that the speaker has asked whether q in making the utterance, etc.

A second point also deserves mention. Some authors have argued, convincingly I think, that the word “knowledge” has both a strong and weak sense (e.g., Goldman & Olsson 2009: 19–21; Hawthorne 2004: 68–70). While propositional knowledge in either sense is factive, a particular positive epistemic status is implied only by the strong sense, which has traditionally been the focus in epistemology. In the weak sense, on the other hand, true belief suffices for knowledge. This raises the question whether (UK) is to be interpreted as involving the strong or the weak notion of knowledge. While this issue matters elsewhere,[11] it can be left open here. TAR threatens (UK) on either construal; so, no matter which version is adopted, TAR must be dealt with, and the arguments considered in this paper all apply equally to the strong and the weak reading of (UK).

Finally, it bears emphasis that (UK) only makes a claim about a necessary condition for utterance understanding, not about a sufficient one.[12] The proponent of (UK) is free to hold that understanding an utterance amounts to coming to know its meaning in a particular way (to be specified by the view). Nothing I say in this paper is incompatible with such a view; I simply leave the matter open.

3. The Target Argument

Before giving an explicit reconstruction of TAR, it makes sense to briefly consider the motivation of the theorists who have pressed it against (UK). This helps both to appreciate the force of the argument and to put it in perspective.

4. Two Unsatisfactory Responses

What’s the right reaction to this argument? In this section, I look at two responses which have been suggested by Guy Longworth (2008) in his brief discussion of the argument. Longworth takes the availability of these responses to reveal “two large gaps” (2008: 56) in the argument, which would have to be closed before the argument could be taken to undermine (UK). However, I will argue that neither of the two suggested responses is satisfactory. Thus, the upshot of the section will be that some other response to TAR is needed if the threat it poses to (UK) is to be eliminated.

5. The Right Response: Two Readings

The right reaction to TAR, I suggest, involves what I’ll call a qualified rejection of the intuitive verdict on which the argument relies. To have a short label, let us call sentences by means of which we attribute understanding of the force and content of an utterance u-sentences.[19] The response grants:

But it adds:

If these claims are correct, then the right assessment of TAR is also a qualified one: TAR succeeds in showing that (UB) and (UK) are false on one interpretation, but does nothing to show that they are also false on a second available interpretation.

I have already given my reasons for granting (T1) in 4.2, so the goal of this section is to establish (T2). My case has two components. First, I offer an argument for (T2) that builds on the connection between utterance understanding and communicative success (Section 5.1). Second, I argue that we also find support for (T2) in our intuitive judgments about cases (Section 5.2). After addressing possible objections in Section 6, the concluding section considers the implications of the proposed assessment of TAR, including the question whether it is satisfactory for proponents of (UK).

One caveat before we start. My response to TAR involves the claim that u-sentences have different “interpretations” or “readings”. But one may ask what that’s supposed to mean. Is the thesis that u-sentences are semantically ambiguous? Or that they are semantically underdetermined and get modulated or sharpened differently in different contexts?[20] While these are certainly legitimate questions, I won’t make any attempt to answer them here, for two reasons. On the one hand, drawing out carefully what exactly the difference between the two hypotheses comes to, and evaluating their pros and cons, would require a lengthy discussion which is beyond the scope of this paper.[21] More importantly, I think that the answer to these questions doesn’t matter for the main purpose of this paper, since the response to TAR I am offering can be made both sufficiently clear and plausible without pinning down the source of the multiple readings exhibited by u-sentences.

6. Objections and Replies

As noted earlier, TAR has been pressed by proponents of (QP), who claim that the target cases both undermine (UK) and support (QP). How might these theorists react to my response? For reasons given in the concluding section, some might find it fully acceptable. But others might not. They might insist that (QP) is true without qualification, while (UK) is false, period. Let’s call a theorist who takes this line a stubborn proponent of (QP). In this section, I consider how a stubborn proponent of (QP) might try to resist my arguments in favor of (T2) and offer some replies.

Objection 1: The alleged support for (T2) from intuitive verdicts (Section 5.2) can easily be explained away as the result of a conversational implicature. When we are tempted to judge that Jane doesn’t understand the utterance, this is due to the fact that, in the relevant context, saying that Jane understands has the false conversational implicature that Jane came to know what Paul said. But strictly and literally, it is true to say that Jane understands. This can be seen from an observation made earlier (Section 4.2): The alleged entailment of the claim that Jane understands—namely, that Jane comes to know, or form a belief as to, what Paul said—is always cancellable. It always seems fine to say:

Response: This observation doesn’t favor the conversational implicature account over the multiple-readings diagnosis. As has often been pointed out, cancellability is (at most) a necessary condition for the presence of a conversational implicature, not a sufficient one.[29] Cancellability indicates that the relevant aspect of the total utterance content is pragmatically (as opposed to semantically) determined; it doesn’t indicate that we are dealing with a conversational implicature as opposed to some other pragmatic phenomenon, such as disambiguation or modulation.

What’s more, other considerations speak strongly against the envisaged implicature diagnosis and its suggestion that (QP) captures the only literal reading of attributions of utterance understanding. Most importantly, there are many perfectly ordinary situations in which we are happy to attribute utterance understanding in the absence of quasi-perceptions of meaning. Here’s one such case:

Ex hypothesi Ulrike did not undergo any relevant seeming. But, surely, we would normally say that she understood the stranger’s utterance. In fact, it seems perfectly fine to describe the case by saying:

While the multiple-readings proposal has no difficulty accounting for these facts, they pose very serious problems for the stubborn proponent of (QP). Thus, once we widen our focus to include further cases and cancellability data, the former emerges as much more plausible than the latter.

Objection 2: The argument from the understanding-communicative success link (Section 5.1) isn’t convincing. Why couldn’t one deny (P2) of the argument, the claim that there’s no communicative success in the target cases? In fact, the assertion that there’s no such success seems to simply beg the question against proponents of (QP).

Response: (P2) doesn’t beg any questions, because it isn’t based on acceptance of (UK) or (UB); it is supported on independent grounds. First, it captures the intuitive verdict about the case (or so I claim), and on this basis enjoys prima facie justification. Secondly, I’ve presented an independent argument for the claim: In cases of assertion, communicative success in the uptake sense requires that the addressee H be put in a certain position vis-à-vis the proposition asserted, such that if H were to believe that the speaker speaks truly, he would come to believe the proposition asserted. (Since putting one’s audience in this position is obviously crucial for the transfer of testimonial knowledge or belief, let’s call this the T-position with respect to the proposition asserted.) The point, then, is that this minimal condition on communicative success isn’t met in the target cases.

But couldn’t the opponent resist this argument? Why, he may ask, should we think that putting the audience in the T-position is required for communicative success per se? Why not think, instead, that it is required only by a combination of communicative and other successes?

An answer to this question was implicit in what I said in Section 5.1, but it’s worth being explicit. As noted, I take it that communicative success in the uptake sense is tied to the goals that are constitutive of speaking with communicative intent: Such success is secured just in case these goals are met. But in the case of assertion, these goals clearly include putting the audience in the T-position with respect to the proposition asserted. Not only is this clear from reflection on one’s own goals in asserting something with communicative intent, it is also shown by the fact that we wouldn’t count someone as speaking with communicative intent if they didn’t have the relevant goal. In particular, we wouldn’t count someone as asserting something with communicative intent if they merely aimed at producing correct and aptly produced quasi-perceptions of meaning, but not also at putting their audience in the T-position with respect to the asserted proposition. For instance, imagine that in Jane and the radio waves Paul was aiming merely at producing a correct quasi-perception of meaning in Jane, but didn’t have any goals beyond that; in particular, assume he had no intention to put Jane in the T-position with respect to the proposition he asserts. Maybe Paul is fully aware of Jane’s condition and just wants to have his fun with her. It’s clear, however, that this would not be a case of Paul speaking with communicative intent. To speak with communicative intent, Paul must think of the quasi-perception of meaning as a means to a further end; and this further end must include Jane’s entering the T-position with respect to the proposition asserted.

It is clear, then, that communicative success in the case of assertion does require putting the audience in the T-position with respect to the asserted proposition; veridical and aptly produced quasi-perceptions of meaning aren’t sufficient for communicative success. What’s more, such quasi-perceptions are also not necessary for communicative success. This is brought out unambiguously by the case of Ulrike. It is obvious that one may be fully aware that Ulrike doesn’t enjoy quasi-perceptions of meaning and yet speak to her with communicative intent; and it is equally obvious that when Ulrike figures out what one is saying, communicative success in the uptake sense is thereby achieved. This observation strengthens the case for denying that there’s communicative success in the target cases in an indirect way. A theorist who rejects (P2) must provide some account of what constitutes communicative success on which to base his claim. For the stubborn proponent of (QP), the obvious proposal would be that communicative success is constituted by veridical quasi-perceptions of meaning; in fact, if he accepts (P1), he is committed to this account of communicative success. The Ulrike case shows that this conception of communicative success is mistaken and thereby adds to the case for (P2).

Objection 3: Let’s say that (P2) is accepted. Still, why couldn’t the proponent of (QP) resist the conclusion of the argument by rejecting (P1), the claim that there is a reading of u-sentences on which (COM) holds true? For instance, why can’t he say that communicative success requires not only understanding, but understanding plus belief, or understanding plus knowledge, where the understanding serves as the basis for the belief or knowledge?

Response: To start with, note that the Ulrike case shows that the stubborn proponent of (QP) cannot say that understanding is a strictly necessary, although not sufficient, condition for communicative success. As just noted, the case shows that quasi-perceptions of meaning—and thus understanding as per (QP)—aren’t necessary for communicative success. Thus, if he grants (P2), the stubborn proponent of (QP) really is committed to denying any constitutive connection between understanding and communicative success. What he can allow regarding the relation between utterance understanding and communicative success is only the following:

The problem with this view is simply that it runs counter to the various considerations in support of (P1) that we have encountered. First, (COM) certainly seems plausible, and (P1) offers a straightforward explanation of this fact: (COM) seems plausible because there is a reading on which it is true. The proponent of (MEANS), on the other hand, would have to come up with a story that attributes the prima facie plausibility of (COM) to some confusion. More importantly, we saw in Section 5.1 that (COM) is entailed by the apparent truisms that communicative success is achieved just in case the goals constitutive of communicative intent are achieved, and that the constitutive goal of communicative intent is having one’s utterance understood. If there is a reading on which both these claims are true, as certainly seems to be the case, then (MEANS) is false. Finally, (P1) accounts for the fact that appropriate contexts elicit the intuition that there’s no understanding in the target cases (Section 5.2), and also for the strong intuitive verdicts that there is both understanding and communicative success in the Ulrike-case. (MEANS), on the other hand, fails to account for either of these facts.

So, there’s certainly much that speaks in favor of (P1) and against (MEANS). In fact, it’s hard to see that (MEANS) has anything going for it other than that it is suggested by (QP), that (QP) has its attractions, and that it would be nice if there was a single correct account of utterance understanding (because u-sentences don’t allow for multiple readings). But that’s clearly not an adequate basis for (MEANS) given the various reasons we have encountered for thinking that there is an interpretation of u-sentences not captured by (QP).

I conclude that the case for (T2) stands: On balance, the evidence clearly supports the view that there is indeed an interpretation of u-sentences on which there’s no utterance understanding in the target cases. (QP) captures at best one interpretation of such sentences, but it can’t lay claim to capture the only interpretation these sentences allow.

7. Conclusion

The goal of this paper has been to assess the threat to (UK) posed by TAR. I have argued that the right verdict is a qualified one. While TAR shows that there is a reading of u-sentences on which (UB) and (UK) are false, there is also a different reading and TAR fails to establish that (UB) and (UK) are false when interpreted in accord with that reading. In other words, for all TAR shows, (UB) and (UK) might well be true on the second reading.

It is worth noting that this defense of (UB) and (UK) against TAR is modest in two respects. First, it shows only that there is a reading on which (UB) and (UK) may be true for all TAR shows, but not that (UB) and (UK) are actually true on the relevant reading. A more ambitious response would also include an argument for this stronger claim. I think that such an argument can be given, and that many of the elements required are already in place from what has been said here. However, giving and defending this argument is a task for a different occasion.

Secondly, the response—even if strengthened in the way just indicated—is modest in acknowledging that (UB) and (UK) are at best instances of what Lewis (1975) calls equivocal or unsharp analyticity, that is, sentences that are analytically true on one reading or sharpening but not on another. Is this too weak a defense of (UB) and (UK)? I don’t see any reason to think so. I’m not aware that any proponent of (UK) has ever explicitly claimed more for this view than that, nor do I see any reasons why they should want to. Consider, for instance, a theorist who puts forward (UK) as part of an account of linguistic communication: He might identify the role of utterance understanding in such an account by means of (COM) and endorse (UK) on this basis.[30] Acknowledging that utterance understanding talk also allows for a different interpretation, one on which (COM) and (UK) don’t hold, need not bother this theorist in any way.

Something similar can also be said for the proponents of (QP). As far as I can see, my response to TAR doesn’t conflict with anything that is of real importance to them. It is compatible with the claim that (QP) is just as much an instance of equivocal or unsharp analyticity as (UK), and it also doesn’t contradict the claim that quasi-perceptions of meaning play a central role in the right epistemological story of how we typically come to know, or have justified beliefs about, what others say. It’s hard to see why the proponent of (QP) should want to claim more than that.

It is clear, then, that the response to TAR I have defended has conciliatory potential. If it is correct, both the proponents of (UK) and of (QP) might be able to get all they really care about and their disagreement might well be revealed as merely verbal.

Acknowledgments

I’m indebted to Brendan Balcerak-Jackson, Wolfgang Barz, Anna-Maria Asunta Eder, Miguel Hoeltje, Insa Lawler, Christian Nimtz, Raphael van Riel, Thorsten Sander, Peter Schulte, Thomas Spitzley, and two anonymous referees of this journal for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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• Vendler, Zeno (1967). Linguistics in Philosophy. Cornell University Press.
• Weiner, Matthew (2006). Are All Conversational Implicatures Cancellable? Analysis, 66(2), 127–130. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/66.2.127
• Williamson, Timothy (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford University Press.

Notes

1. See, e.g., Davidson (2001: 125, 141), Dummett (1978: 171; 1993: 60), Evans (1982: 311–312), Heck (1995: 82; 2001: 5–6), Peacocke (1976: 170–171), Schiffer (1987: 3–6; 2003: 99).

2. In Hunter’s paper the argument occupies central stage; in Fricker’s, it is presented only as one argument among others (2003: 331, 345). Pettit (2002: 542–547; 2005) can also be interpreted as endorsing the argument, but his case is not fully clear. The official target of Pettit’s argument is the view that understanding a linguistic expression (qua type) requires a belief as to its meaning, not the view that understanding an utterance does. Nevertheless, some of his remarks strongly suggest that he would also be willing to endorse the argument as it applies to utterance understanding.

3. As this sketch indicates, the argument is structurally similar to familiar arguments against the views that seeing that p entails knowing that p and that remembering that p entails knowing that p. See Turri (2010) and Bernecker (2007) for recent installments of these arguments with respect to seeing and remembering respectively.

4. The argument has been endorsed by Malmgren (2006: 214 Footnote 36) and Barber (2013: 967). The only critical discussion of which I am aware is in Longworth (2008). However, Longworth’s discussion of TAR is brief and only tentative. I look at it in Section 4.

5. The parenthetical qualification is required only if one thinks that the actual illocutionary force and content of an utterance may deviate from the intended force and content. There are influential accounts of illocutionary acts, e.g., the intentionalist (or Gricean) accounts of Schiffer (1972) and Bach and Harnish (1979), according to which such a deviation is impossible. The rest of the paper is framed on the assumption that some such account is correct, as this allows me to drop the qualification and thereby simply the exposition. The focus on intended force and content will become relevant when we turn to the connection between understanding and communicative success in Section 5.1.

6. We can ignore utterances involving more than one illocutionary act for the purpose of this paper.

7. While distinct, the success and the success-neutral notions of understanding are closely connected. That H understands U (success sense) entails that H understands U as having a particular meaning (success-neutral sense) and that U in fact has that meaning.

8. While Fricker (2003) is exclusively and unambiguously concerned with the view that understanding in the success sense implies knowledge, Hunter’s (1998) target is somewhat broader. He aims to undermine the view that “states of understanding are states of belief or knowledge” (1998: 560). In fact, much of his discussion is directed at the view that understanding in the success-neutral sense implies belief, and the cases he describes are presented as counterexamples to this view. However, it is clear from his discussion that he takes these cases to also undermine (UK).

9. Fricker doesn’t note the distinction and her discussion shifts back and forth between the two senses. Hunter draws a distinction between “states of understanding” and “events of understanding”, which appears to be closely related to the distinction I am drawing, and makes it clear that his concern is with the former. However, his discussion leaves no doubt that he takes his examples to count just as much against the view concerning achievement-understanding on which I am focusing.

10. One might be tempted, at first sight, to construe the above formulation differently, viz., as involving the notion of objectual knowledge, so that “knowing the force and content of utterance U” is to be understood on the model of “knowing the father and mother of Paul.” But there are very good reasons to resist this temptation; see Sainsbury (2002: 181–184) and Longworth (2008: 65–70).

11. There are objections to (UK) which focus specifically on the issue of epistemic status. In particular, it has been argued that, in contrast to knowledge, utterance understanding is compatible with the kind of epistemic luck that is characteristic of Gettier cases (Longworth 2008: 56–57; cf. Pettit 2002). In contrast to TAR, this line of argument counts only against the version of (UK) involving the strong notion of knowledge.

12. Thus, (UK) isn’t threatened by alleged counterexamples to this sufficiency claim. For instance, Fricker (2003: 332) claims that coming to know what someone said in an utterance based on a translation doesn’t amount to understanding the utterance.

13. To say that the experience is “aptly produced” is to say that it is in part the result of an exercise of the subject’s dispositional understanding of the sentence uttered.

14. Hunter describes multiple cases varying in the kind of misleading defeater involved, but these differences don’t matter here. Similar cases are described by Longworth (2008: 55) and Pettit (2002: 544–545; 2005: 71–72).

15. As these remarks indicate, I take the argument against (UB) to be an instance of what is now often called the method of cases (e.g., Pust 2014). There has been much discussion recently about the correct reconstruction of this method. As far as I can see, these debates are irrelevant for the purposes of this paper. However, I should note that, despite skeptical challenges to the contrary, I take it for granted here that our intuitive judgments concerning cases like Jane and the radio waves constitute prima facie evidence for or against philosophical claims such as (UB).

16. In the relevant passage Williamson discusses alleged counterexample to the claim that seeing that p implies knowing that p. The text makes it clear, however, that Williamson eventually endorses a different response to the alleged counterexamples: He sticks to (KB), but denies that the alleged counterexample are really cases of seeing-that. I consider this line of response in Section 4.2.

17. I think the application of Williamson’s move to the case of understanding fails also for another reason, namely, that the difference between propositional and objectual utterance understanding is merely superficial: Plausibly, to understand the force and content of an utterance is to understand that the utterance has such-and-such force and content. Longworth (2008: 63–64) claims that propositional understanding is non-factive, which would imply that this equivalence cannot hold. But while I agree that attributions of understanding-that have a non-factive reading, I think Longworth is mistaken in suggesting that they have only such a reading. In fact, his claim—which is based on consideration of a single example—flies in the face of a consensus in the literature on non-linguistic understanding that a factive reading is available (e.g., Kvanvig 2003: 190–191; Baumberger, Beisbart, & Brun 2017: 7).

18. Similar points could be made with respect to the proposal that the intuitive verdict tracks only a conversational implicature. In addition, note that (false) conversational implicatures are normally invoked to explain why we judge something false that is strictly and literally true. In the present case, however, it would have to be claimed that a (true) conversational implicatures explains why we judge something true that is strictly and literally false. This latter kind explanation has much less plausibility, and I am not aware that it has been proposed for other linguistic constructions.

19. I take such sentences to include not only those of the form ‘A understands the force and content of U’, but also ones of the form ‘A understands U’, ‘A understands what S says’ and ‘A understands S’.

20. For accounts of semantic underdetermination and processes of modulation see, e.g., Ludlow (2014), Rayo (2013), and Recanati (2004).

21. The distinction between ambiguity (including polysemy) and underdetermination may be easy to draw in some cases, but it is much harder to draw in others. The case of u-sentences arguably falls in the area where deciding on the right classification is difficult.

22. Other examples of such goals include consoling someone, impressing someone, intimidating someone, making someone laugh, etc.

23. Remember that I’m restricting attention to utterances in which a single illocutionary act is performed. To accommodate more complex cases the principle would need some fine-tuning. Remember also that I’m concerned throughout with the intended force and content of an utterance: If actual and intended illocutionary force and content can come apart, it’s clearly understanding of the latter that’s crucial for communicative success. Finally, I should note that some of the authors cited talk about understanding of speaker’s meaning: They say that communication succeeds iff the addressee understands what the speaker means. But this difference is negligible given the intimate connection between intended illocutionary force and content and speaker’s meaning: When a speaker performs a single illocutionary act in uttering a sentence (no indirect illocutionary acts, no implicatures), the intended force and content of his utterance exhaust what the speaker means in uttering the sentence. Accordingly, in such cases understanding the intended force and content of an utterance and understanding what the speaker means plausibly come to the same thing.

24. The label is apt because (COM) arguably captures what is right about Austin’s (1980) claim that “uptake”, i.e., understanding of a speech act’s illocutionary force and content, is necessary for the successful performance of illocutionary acts. To see the connection, note that at least some illocutionary acts—e.g., telling someone that p or warning someone that p—appear to be such that intending to perform them entails intending to be understood (or, in light of the point made in the next paragraph, intending to perform them entails communicative intent). Accordingly, fully successful performance of these acts seems to require “uptake” on the part of intended audience. Cf. Rumfitt (2005: 432).

25. Of course, the goal of being understood is intimately connected to our perlocutionary goals in that we normally cannot hope to achieve the latter without achieving the former.

26. Note that since (COM) has its basis in the nature of communicative intentions, the principle is about communicative success relative to the speaker’s goals. This is worth pointing out since evaluations of communicative success are arguably sensitive to contextually salient interests and goals related to communication, which may, but need not, coincide with those of the speaker.

27. Compare Rumfitt (2005: 441–443) for an explicit statement of the corresponding claim about utterance understanding, viz., that if x understands an assertion and believes the assertion to be true, then x comes to believe what is asserted. This claim about understanding provides the basis for a more direct argument for (T2), i.e., one which doesn’t make a detour to considerations of communicative success. However, because of its directness, this argument risks being accused of begging the question against the proponents of (QP). This is one reason why I argue via the connection with communicative success. But, of course, the claim about understanding and my claim about the requirements on communicative success in the main text are closely connected: Each entails the other in conjunction with (COM).

28. I take it that “getting what x said” is just a colloquial variant of “understanding what X said”. But nothing hinges on this assumption: The verdict remains the same if the mother’s reply is formulated explicitly in terms of “understanding”.

29. Cf. Grice (1989: 44) and Carston (1988: 158). While the standard view holds that cancellability is a necessary condition for the presence of a conversational implicature, this has been challenged by Weiner (2006).

30. For instance, he might hold that what constitutes understanding and communicative success is recognition of the speaker’s intentions (or recognition of what the speaker means) and that recognition of intentions entails coming to know these intentions. Something like this reasoning arguably underwrites endorsement of (UK) among authors in the Gricean tradition, such as Schiffer (1987) and Meggle (1997).