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Abstract

In recent years the view that understanding a language requires knowing what its words and expressions mean has come under attack. One line of attack attempts to show that while knowledge can be undermined by Gettier-style counterexamples, language understanding cannot be. I consider this line of attack, particularly in the work of Pettit (2002) and Longworth (2008), and show it to be unpersuasive. I stress, however, that maintaining a link between language understanding and knowledge does not itself vindicate a cognitivist view of the former.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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