Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Semantic competence is the ability to understand sentences (more generally, expressions) of a natural language. I will sketch a history of the debates concerning semantic competence, from Chomsky's introduction of the general notion of linguistic competence (1965) to present-day "simulationists" models of language understanding, wich identify semantic competence with the ability to "re-enact" past experiences, based on linguistic input. I will go through Chomsky's criticism of philosophical semantics, the main philosophically-originated semantic theories (Montague's and Davidson's) and their accounts of competence, criticism of such accounts (by Partee, Searle, and others), diverging responses to such criticism: internalism (Jackendoff, Johnson-Laird), non-cognitive externalism (Putnam), cognitive externalim (Harnad, Marconi). Finally, I will present the now widely supported simulationist paradigm (Gallese & Lakoff, Barsalou, etc.) and point out some of its difficulties.