ABSTRACT
Semantic competence is the ability to understand sentences (more generally, expressions) of a natural language. I sketch a history of the debates concerning semantic competence, from Chomsky’s introduction of the general notion of linguistic competence to present-day “simulationist” models of language understanding, which identify semantic competence with the ability to “re-enact” past experiences, based on linguistic input. I go through Chomsky’s criticism of philosophical semantics, the main philosophically originated semantic theories (Montague’s and Davidson’s) and their accounts of competence, criticism of such accounts (by Partee, Searle, and others), and diverging responses to such criticism: internalism (Jackendoff, Johnson-Laird), non-cognitive externalism (Putnam), cognitive externalism (Harnad, Marconi). Finally, I will present the now widely supported simulationist paradigm (Gallese & Lakoff, Barsalou, etc.) and point out some of its difficulties.
