Comprendere il linguaggio

How do we understand each other? That is, what does language understanding consist of? If we limit ourselves to the last hundred years, two families of theories have placed the notion of understanding at the center of their interests. For a group of theories, discovering what happens in people’s heads is not illuminating to clarify the nature of understanding. Understanding is an essentially social capacity, which we attribute based on publicly observable behaviors. This anti-psychological stance has been assumed by those philosophers who, faithful to Ludwig Wittgenstein's teaching, stressed the uses of language in ordinary communicative contexts (for example, Michael Dummett and Robert Brandom). According to this view, understanding can be studied utilizing the traditional philosophical methodologies (e.g., conceptual analysis), without “getting up from the armchair.” For another group of theories, understanding is essentially a psychological process. Hence, studying understanding means studying this process empirically, discovering which mechanisms in the head allow us to grasp what other speakers communicate linguistically to us. This psychological view has its roots in the AI works on natural language starting from the seventies and eighties of the last century, as well as in the research in cognitive science on the border between psychology and linguistics. In recent years, psychological theories have relied heavily on neuropsychological and neuroimaging data, an impressively growing trend. The current debate is dominated by advocates of simulation theories, according to which understanding requires the reactivation of sensorimotor brain areas, and advocates of amodal theories of language understanding, according to which understanding is made possible by the activation of abstract, symbolic representations. The purpose of this book is to offer a concise, highly readable, and reasoned interdisciplinary introduction to the phenomenon of linguistic understanding, and to the philosophical and scientific problems that it raises. The text is divided into two sections. The first part is devoted to the discussion of the concept of understanding and the main problem associated with it (that is, the problem of psychologism). The second part is devoted to a reasoned presentation of the recent research on the psycho-neural basis of understanding.