Acquaintance as Grounded in Joint Attention

Abstract

Abstract One great opposition in philosophy of language has been between those who take the shared language as fundamental to human cognition and those who argue that all human cognitive capacities, including knowledge of language, are grounded in individualistic cognitions. Those who took the primacy of the shared language seriously, such as Whorf and Wittgenstein, were resistant to the idea of reference to mind-independent objects, and statements being made true or false by a mind-independent world. This chapter sketches out a way of reinstating the primacy of the shared language that gives full weight to the role of reference and truth. Accepting that an understanding of language has a fundamentally social grounding means that we do not regard language as grounded in individualistic cognitions, but also gives full place to the idea that knowledge of reference is basic to language mastery.

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