Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Competent language use without knowledge

I can competently use a word without knowing what the word means. Just imagine some Gettier case, such as that my English teacher tried to teach me a falsehood about what “lynx” means, but due to themselves misremembering what the word means, they taught me the correct meaning. Justified true belief is clearly enough for competent use.

But if I then use “lynx”, even though I don’t know what the word means, I do know what I mean by it. Could one manufacture a case where I competently use a word but don’t even know what I mean by it?

Maybe. Suppose I am a student and a philosopher professor convinces me that I am so confused that don’t know what I mean when I use the word “supervenience” in a paper. I stop using the word. But then someone comments on an old online post of mine from the same period as the paper, in which post I used “supervenience”. The commenter praises how insightfully I have grasped the essence of the concept. This someone uses a false name, that of an eminent philosopher. I come to believe on the supposed authority of this person that I meant by “supervenience” what I in fact did mean by it, and I resume using it. But the authority is false. It seems that now I am using the word without knowing what I mean by it. And I could be entirely competent.

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