The Basicness of Knowing, Where Semantics meets Philosophy: The KNOW prime of Natural Semantic Metalanguage and its philosophical implications

Abstract

The topic of this thesis is the semantic prime KNOW of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory. I take an in-depth look at this NSM prime, proposed to be a fundamental concept found in all the world’s languages, considering both linguistic and broader philosophical issues in relation to the KNOW hypothesis, i.e. the proposal that the concept represented by KNOW is a legitimate NSM prime. After introducing NSM and defending a specific “psychological” interpretation of the theory (Chapter 1), I outline the KNOW proposal, including discussion of the combinatorial properties ascribed to it and how they have evolved in recent years (Chapter 2). I then look at would-be counterexamples to the universality of KNOW from a handful of languages (Chapter 3). I argue that overall the prime stands up well to these challenges, though the case of Kalam (Pawley 1994) does raise some issues that require further investigation and possibly novel kinds of testis to resolve. Then in the first part of the “philosophical” side to the thesis, I draw a comparison with the KNOW hypothesis and Timothy Williamson’s (2001) view that knowing is a conceptually fundamental concept, finding both striking similarities and instructive differences between the positions (Chapter 4). Lastly, I consider the “experimental philosophy” findings made by Weinberg et al. (2001) on what looks like cultural variation in concepts of knowing, addressing the question of whether such results are problematic for the universality of the KNOW prime (Chapter 5). Here I contend that such studies do not pose a threat to KNOW, not least because they come with a multitude of methodological issues, including specifically linguistic issues, many of which could be prevented by constructing NSM-based questionnaires. In Chapter 6, I conclude, pointing to several important avenues for further research brought up by the discussion, both on the subject of continued research on the KNOW prime and in relation to interdisciplinary applications of NSM to philosophy. Show more