The way we think about disagreement is shaped by the systematic emphasizing of its adversarial, non-cooperative aspects. This is due to a perspective on arguing and disagreeing. Perspectives enable some thoughts and occlude others. We claim that the way some issues are thought of in aesthetics is conditioned by a similar phenomenon we call ‘the Received Image’ (RI), which parallels the influence on ethics of what Bernard Williams called ‘systems of morality’. Peter Kivy argued that disagreements in aesthetics, if genuine, (...) presuppose that contenders are tacit realists about ‘art-relevant properties’: the motivation for arguing lies in making the adversary acknowledge (epistemic) defeat (in pursuing agreement from others). He draws this conclusion from what he sees as a fundamental difference between aesthetics and ethics. However, in our view, Kivy and his opponents in the semantic meta-debate on disagreement think under the aegis of the RI. We look at disagreements about art from a neo-cognitivist perspective, and argue that heuristic similarities between aesthetics and ethics stand out with an understanding-based epistemology coupled with an adequate theory of artistic form: form as a perspective-generating device whose grasping involves ‘infinitely fine adjustments’. (shrink)

This paper offers a normative account of the speech act of explanation with understanding as its norm. The previous accounts of the speech act of explanation rely on the factive notion of understanding and maintain that proper explanations require knowledge. I argue, however, that such accounts are too demanding and do not reflect the everyday practice of explanation and the attribution of understanding. Instead, I argue that the non-factive, objectual attitude of understanding is sufficient for a proper explanation. On the (...) normative level, explanations are governed by an audience-centred norm, i.e., they are sensitive to the epistemic position of the audience. According to the proposed account, an explanation is a communicative act in which one puts the audience in a position to understand the explained phenomenon. This proposal fits into the recent wave of applications of the normative account and makes space for the pluralism of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

Consider reading the news about the recent election, taking part in a classroom discussion about injustice, or having a conversation about dinner, with your friend. In these cases, you rely on your capacity for linguistic understanding. How do we come to understand what other people communicate to us on particular occasions? In recent philosophical debates about this question, we find two broad approaches: the perceptual approach, which claims that we come to understand an utterance by employing broadly perceptual capacities to (...) perceive or quasi-perceive the utterance’s meaning; and the inferential approach, which claims that we come to understand an utterance by employing broadly inferential capacities to infer what is being conveyed by an utterance. This paper focuses on the debates concerning these two approaches. We provide conceptual and methodological clarifications regarding linguistic understanding and introduce some of the key philosophical debates concerning its nature, including those concerning its phenomenology and underlying psychology, with a focus on the role of perception and inference. We also discuss some epistemological questions concerning the understanding of linguistic utterances and different views that try to explain its epistemological role(s). This paper is an introduction to the special issue ‘Linguistic Understanding: Perception and Inference’. (shrink)