What Does it Mean to Understand Language?

In its earliest drafts, this paper was a structured argument, presenting a comprehensive view of cognitive science, criticizing prevailing approaches to the study of language and thought and advocating a new way of looking at things. Although I strongly believed in the approach it outlined, somehow it didn’t have the convincingness on paper that it had in my own reflection. After some discouraging attempts at reorganization and rewriting, I realized that there was a mismatch between the nature of what I wanted to say and the form in which I was trying to communicate. The understanding on which it was based does not have the form of a carefully structured framework into which all of cognitive science can be placed. It is more an orientation-a way of approaching the phenomena-that has grown out of many different experiences and influences and that bears the marks of its history. I found myself wanting to describe a path rather than justify its destination, finding that in the flow, the ideas came across more clearly. Since this collection was envisioned as a panorama of contrasting individual views, I have taken the liberty of making this chapter explicitly personal and describing the evolution of my own understanding. My interests have centered around natural language. I have been engaged in the design of computer programs that in some sense could be said to “understand language, ’ ’ and this has led to looking at many aspects of the problems, including theories of meaning, representation formalisms, and the design and construction of complex computer systems. There has been a continuous evolution in my understanding of just what it means to say that a person or computer “understands,” and this story’ can be read as recounting that evolution. It is