Abstract

One proposal is to generalize UAl to define an epistemological notion of analyticity: a sentence s is analytic just in case, necessarily, whoever understands s assents to s. This chapter considers what is epistemically available simply on the basis of linguistic and conceptual competence. It deals with a provisional sketch of some obstacles to extracting epistemological consequences from understanding‐assent links and of some attempts to overcome them. A trickier question is whether such possibilities of an illusion of understanding have negative epistemological repercussions for cases of genuine understanding, since a skeptical doubt can arise for the subject in the latter cases too as to whether the understanding is not an illusion. Quine’s epistemological holism in “Two Dogmas” undermines his notorious later claim about the deviant logician’s predicament: “when he tries to deny the doctrine he only changes the subject”.