My understanding of children’s cognitive development involved a series of progressive shifts in my understanding of what is involved in learning a language. Rather than language serving as a means of expressing and sharing existing thoughts, I came to see language as the exclusive means of creating thought itself. To my surprise I have become a sort of “Nominalist”; the view that language is the vehicle of thought itself.

It is not surprising that young children sometimes misunderstand expressions. There is a well-known children’s game called “Simon Says.” The parent or teacher gives the rule: Only do what Simon says. The adult then says, “Simon says touch your nose,” but sometimes says only “Shake your head.” Children are to comply with the first but not the second. Google provides a brief video as part of its entry for “Simon Says.” It reveals, what is often reported, three- or four-year-olds often comply with both, while slightly older children are more able to make the distinction, but all children love the game. The game is an early introduction to the rules for correct understanding. Understanding correctly is difficult because the main clause determines how the other clause is to be understood.

In Chapter 7, I argued that it was appropriate for us to ascribe understanding to young children and computers, as their behavior meets the criteria of correctness and intersubjectivity. What they cannot yet do, I argued, is ascribe understanding – that is, claim or attribute understanding – to themselves or others. Why does that matter?

Whitman, of course, was the evangelist for first-person subjective experience. In Chapter 3, I argued that understanding should be seen as including a subjective feeling, an emotion, and an objective achievement. Feelings and emotions are characterized as having such properties as valence, strength, and “content.” That content is conferred by an appraisal of the current situation in the light of prior experience; thus, different appraisals evoke different feelings. I will refer to the content of a feeling state as an intuition with “identity conditions” that may be quite different from those for concepts and beliefs.

Feelings are conscious states evoked by situations and, presumably, experienced by all animals. Most of us judge the feelings of young children and other animals as sufficiently similar to our own that we attribute or ascribe feelings, understandings, and beliefs to them. Clearly, the ascription of mental states, a verbal practice, depends on the availability of concepts. The question is whether the states themselves depend on such a verbal practice. I have suggested that they do. Those concepts, represented as the senses of the word “understanding,” go beyond feelings to include both correctness (Chapter 5) and intersubjectivity (Chapter 6). Thus, the relationship between subjective feeling and the concepts representing those feelings may be compared in terms of their “identity conditions,” that is, the features that distinguish them that came to light in the discussion of the views of Taylor and Nussbaum and Jackendoff (2012).

In Chapter 5, I set out the notion of correctness as a condition for understanding. If one understands, one understands correctly. This feature allows a distinction between understanding and misunderstanding. In this chapter, I set out a second feature for understanding, namely that the concept of understanding is applicable to self and the other. In Chapter 2, I pointed out that “understanding” was a word in a public language such as English and, being public, is shared between self and the other.

In Chapter 4, I suggested that young children may experience a feeling of understanding, namely that something makes sense, before they acquire a concept of understanding. However, that subjective feeling may not meet an appropriate level of truth or correctness. Young children may feel they understand, when in fact they misunderstand. Adults recognize the possibility of misunderstanding. Thus, one of the identity conditions for understanding is that of truth or correctness.

When our daughter Joan was little more than a year old, on a whim I said to her, “Joanie, go get your shoes.” To that point, she had never said a word or given any indication of understanding language, so my request was clearly unrealistic. Yet she looked at me briefly, wheeled around, and disappeared down the hallway. Moments later, she returned, shoes in hand and a smile on her face that expressed a pride matched only by that felt by her astonished father. She understood!

Modern linguists, like the hermeneuticists before them, insist that language is an autonomous, self-contained system, a module, in which components, whether phonological, semantic, or grammatical, are represented in terms of each other – /b/ differs from /p/ by a single feature “voiced”; bachelor differs from male adult by the feature “married,” and so on (Jackendoff, 2002). As Saussure (1958) put it, “In language there are only differences.” Although, in humans, learning a language appears to also depend on knowledge of the world of reference, what is learned is a language, “an autonomous system existing in the mind” (Katz & Fodor, 1963). These linguistic structures – technically “semantic structures” or Fregean senses, are the meanings in the language that exist quite independently of the ways that those semantic structures refer to the world. Thus, senses are not merely signs; they are meanings defined in terms of each other – dog as an animal, green as a color, up as opposed to down, and so on.

In the first chapter of this book, I contrasted the first-order subjective experience of understanding, the “A ha!” experience of making sense, with the objective valid ascription of understanding that had long been the concern of analytical philosophers. I sought to bring the first-person experience and the third-person ascription together into one account of understanding.

A philosophical tradition going back to Descartes assumed that human beings have an indubitable consciousness of their own minds but that knowledge of other minds was at best inferred. What they failed to see was that the consciousness, the felt experience that could not be doubted, was not the same as introspection. William James, as mentioned in Chapter 4, was guilty of this conflation. Introspection is enabled by mental concepts used in ascribing mental states to others. Put simply, introspection is self-ascription; one cannot introspect without linguistic concepts of mind. As Montgomery (2005, p. 120) pointed out in regard to children’s acquisition of theory of mind, “introspective knowledge [plays a much smaller role] in mental concept formation than is sometimes claimed.” Montgomery’s concern has been ignored by those influenced by Simulation Theory.

Making sense is the subjective experience that allows the child or other animal the confidence to go on, to expect that the world is unfolding much as it has in the past. Such subjective states are manifest to us as observers as interest, curiosity, and a willingness to go on, to learn and even to repeat an activity and enjoy the satisfactions of achieving one’s goals. We adults know such feelings and we attribute them to the children.

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.