13 - Understanding in Everyday Life

Summary

To this point I have offered an account of understanding by examining the conditions under which one can correctly and appropriately ascribe understanding to oneself or another. Correctness, I argued, depends on honoring the evidence available from an expression or text. Intersubjectivity is achieved by bringing the beliefs of the speaker and listener into alignment. These beliefs and expectations were left relatively unanalyzed, sometimes simply glossed as “context.” What calling this background the context fails to acknowledge is the depth of the beliefs and commitments that subjects bring to their understanding, commitments so fundamental that the linguistic properties of an expression are neglected. This is one implication of the proposition that all understanding involves the fixation and updating of beliefs; understanding is never the sentence processing independent of these beliefs.