This Week’s Meeting: Lars Dänzer

Our meeting this Thursday (February 23rd) will be led by Lars Dänzer, a PhD student at the University of Cologne who is visiting NYU’s philosophy department this year. Lars will present some of his work on language understanding, entitled ‘Understanding a Sentence of a Language’. Here is his abstract:

What is it to understand a sentence of a language? There are two traditional kinds of answers to this question. According to the first, understanding a sentence requires having propositional knowledge of some sort about the sentence or its components. According to the second, understanding a sentence does not require any such knowledge, but merely the possession of a certain ability or disposition. In the talk I’ll argue in favour of an account of the first sort, according to which understanding a sentence is (roughly) a matter of being in a state which, in one way or another, realizes possession of the information about the kind of speech act typically performed by speakers of the language in uttering the sentence. I’ll argue that this account emerges as the best way to resolve an apparent dilemma: On the one hand, the fact that understanding a sentence can be realized by different cognitive mechanisms in different subjects seems to force us towards an account in terms of abilities or dispositions. On the other, it appears that our only way to make sense of how we manage to understand the utterances of others is in inferential terms, which strongly counts in favour of some kind of propositional knowledge view after all.

As usual, the meeting will take place on Thursday evening at 7:00 in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!