Perceptual and Epistemic Views About Language Understanding; A Critical Study

There are two main theories about the nature of language understanding and its properties: perceptual and epistemic. Epistemic view believes that understanding a phrase is nothing but knowing its meaning. But perceptual view believes that to understand a bit of language is just like perception. This article introduces these two approaches and tries to examined them. As we try to show, language understanding in epistemic view is not in fact a kind of knowledge. For example, understanding a bit of language could be compatible with luck. Also, some language analysis show that we can understand a bit of language without any specific belief. In other words, belief is not necessary for linguistic understanding. In addition, there are some familiarities between understanding a bit of language and seeing a thing. For instance, understanding language is an automatic state like seeing a thing. Beside, we understand a bit of language interpreted and with content, just like seeing a thing. Although, epistemic view has some advantages. For example, epistemic view can explain the cognitive and inferential role of general and linguistic knowledge in understanding a bit of language. In this paper, we try to show that our linguistic knowledge in perceptual view has a psychological role, and our general knowledge of world can account a part of our understanding dispositional in understanding a bit of language, so we do not need a cognitive and inferential explanation for linguistic understanding, necessarily. In short, the perceptual view has some advantages but the view encounter with some challenges: first, the process of understanding a bit of language is not clear, conceptually. Second, the perceptual view cannot explain how we do understand a sentence or phrase in second language. Finally, this approach cannot explain how we understand a new sentence and ambiguous phrase.