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Language-Mastery and the Sorites Paradox

This chapter, originally written for Gareth Evans’s and John McDowell’s edited anthology of papers, Truth and Meaning, on the philosophical issues raised by Davidsonian truth-theoretic semantics for natural language, reprises the key arguments of Chapter 1, but with a more explicit focus on the question: what is the nature of linguistic competence? Can it, at least at the most basic level, be viewed as consisting in propositional knowledge of, and a consequent ability to follow, semantic and syntactic rules? The suggestion is that the Davidsonian programme is implicitly invested in a positive answer to that question, and that one lesson of the Sorites is to make that answer seriously doubtful, mandating a ‘more purely behaviouristic’ conception of basic linguistic competence.