Understanding, Significance and Practical Concepts

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christoph Demmerling
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2014 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 249625529

The research project pursues the goal of explaining how non-linguistic processes of understanding, e.g. those which are involved in instrumental behavior or perceptual experiences, are to be conceived and explained against the background of classical challenges in the philosophy of language. The central thesis of the project claims that high-level and linguistically mediated processes of understanding, which are meaningful, emerge from low-level and non-linguistic, bodily-sensual (leiblich-sinnlich) mediated interactions with the environment, which constitute significance. Meaning and significance are understood as mutually constitutive phenomena, whose interrelation can be shown and made explicit on the basis of an analysis of the preconditions of linguistic understanding. The relevance of concepts for linguistic and non-linguistic understanding will especially be examined in this regard. As constituent parts of thoughts, concepts are considered to be essential for both kinds of understanding. The recent scholarly debate will be broadened by introducing the notion of non-linguistic practical concepts, which will be used to conceive of instrumental behavior and perceptual experience as non-linguistic attachments to the world, which are nevertheless ways of understanding. The research project will avoid overly narrow concepts of understanding, which conceptualize understanding modeled on linguistically propositional understanding, as much as it will avoid overly broad concepts, which equate understanding with reliable responsiveness to changing environmental conditions. By linking the debate of the preconditions of linguistic understanding to recent debates in the philosophy of mind concerning the relevance of concepts in actions and experiences of linguistic beings, the project leads to a new, pragmatically grounded concept of understanding and sketches an alternative to the representational paradigm in philosophy and cognitive science. In this manner, a renewal of the philosophy of language after the cognitive turn is also sought.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants