Two SLLL students of Anna Wierzbicka's (Dominie Dessaix, Honours, and Gian Marco Farecse, PhD) will be presenting at the 'International Ethno-Epistemology Conference' to be held in Japan in June, where Cliff Goddard will be a keynote speaker.

As preparation for this conference, they will be giving pre-conference talks at ANU. The schedule and abstracts are posted below. All welcome.

Dominie Dessaix: The Basicness of ‘know’: The Natural Semantic Metalanguage perspective
3pm - 3:40 plus discussion time

Gian Marco Farese: Why 知る (shiru) is a universal semantic prime and how分かる (wakaru) can be explicated via知るshiru
4pm - 4:40 plus discussion time

The Basicness of ‘know’: The Natural Semantic Metalanguage perspective
Dominie Dessaix

This paper forms part of a project situated at the intersection of cross-linguistic semantics and analytic epistemology, in which I take an in-depth look at semantic prime know in NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage; see Wierzbicka 1972, Goddard and Wierzbicka 1994, 2002). The present paper is separated into two parts, focusing respectively on some linguistic, and some broader philosophical, issues related to the proposal that the NSM prime know represents a cross-linguistically universal and semantically basic concept. In the first part, I consider two apparent counterexamples to the universality of the prime know, that is, claims that a given language has no distinct ‘know’ concept. The languages I consider are those of Dalabon, an Australian language analysed by Evans (2007), and Kalam, a Trans-New Guinea language analysed by Pawley (1994). I claim that neither case threatens the proposal that the concept represented by know is universal across languages, though the case of Kalam brings out some difficulties in the approach (not the problems original proposed by Pawley, however), which will hopefully be resolved with more rigorous testing. In the second part of the paper, I discuss how the know prime relates to philosophical theories of knowledge in the analytic tradition. In particular, I consider whether the inclusion of the know prime in the NSM inventory may amount to an alliance with, or constitute support for, a position like that of Williamson (2000), whose “knowledge-first” model of epistemology involves taking ‘know’ as a primitive concept on quite different grounds. Here I will argue that the two positions do bolster one another in certain ways, though NSM actually undermines one of Williamson’s arguments for the knowledge-first thesis. Finally, I consider certain much-discussed results in “experimental philosophy”, results that appear to demonstrate the existence of cultural variation in epistemic intuitions (especially Weinberg et al. 2001), arguing that such findings do not succeed in undermining the cross-linguistic (and thus cross-cultural) universality of the specific ‘know’ concept represented by the NSM prime know. In fact, I claim that the methodology of studies aiming to test cross-linguistic or cross-cultural variation in intuitions could be significantly improved by heeding some of the findings of NSM.

Why 知る (shiru) is a universal semantic prime and how分かる (wakaru) can be explicated via知るshiru
Gian Marco Farese

This paper focuses on the debated question of the “universality of ‘know’” and questions the assumption made in the call for papers of the conference “Epistemology for the Rest of the World” (Tokyo, August 8-9, 2013) that “there is currently very little reason to think that the universality thesis is true, since little or nothing is known about the meaning and use of epistemic terms in languages other than English”. As pointed out by Wierzbicka (in press), the question should not be on the universality of ‘know’ as a verb in the English language, but on the universality of the concept of ‘knowing’ across different languages. English cannot be used as the universal linguistic point of reference for discussing epistemology because it comes with its own historical and cultural baggage which reflects the way of thinking of one particular linguaculture (Wierzbicka 2006, 2014). For this reason, this paper shares the view that it is paramount to look into how ‘knowing’ is conceptualised and expressed in the languages of “the Rest of the World”.

This has been thoroughly investigated over decades by the researchers who adopt the methodology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014; Goddard 2011; Wierzbicka 2009, in press). Over the years, empirical evidence has been found which shows that KNOW is a universal semantic prime with lexical exponents in all languages. Besides, evidence suggests that KNOW can be expressed in four canonical syntactic constructions which also appear to be universally available. Japanese is no exception, and a lexical exponent for the universal KNOW with the same valency options identified in other languages is available in this language too.

The scope of this paper is two-fold: firstly, to question the assumption made in the above cited call for papers that “in Japanese there are two words used to translate ‘know’ in propositional knowledge attributions, ‘Shitte-iru’ and ‘Wakatte-iru’, neither of which has the same extension as ‘know’” and show that 知る (SHIRU) is the only equivalent Japanese exponent of the prime KNOW (cf. Wierzbicka 1991); secondly, to shed light on the differences between 知る (shiru) and 分かる (wakaru) showing that the latter is not a prime, but a more complex concept which can be explicated via shiru. So far, the difference between these two verbs has never been discussed clearly, without using technical terms or words like ‘empathy’, ‘detachment’, ‘awareness’ and especially ‘knowledge’ (Kiri 2006; Sadler 2010) which are Anglo-centric and not recognisable by native Japanese speakers. NSM, on the contrary, has proved itself an optimal tool for elucidating the meaning of words and concepts in simple, clear and cross-translatable terms.

The proposed semantic explication for wakaru is phrased in both English and Japanese exponents of the NSM primes (Asano-Cavanagh and Farese 2015), with the aim of achieving cultural neutrality and intelligibility from both speakers of Japanese and non-Japanese speakers who wish to understand the differences with shiru and how wakaru and can be explicated via shiru.