What is it to understand a sentence of a language? This question lies at the very heart of
philosophy of language due to its intimate connections with two other issues: the nature of
linguistic meaning and the workings of linguistic communication. This book presents a
systematic attempt to explicate the concept of sentence understanding guided by two questions:
What exactly is the role played by states of sentence understanding in enabling linguistic
communication? And what do such states have to be in order to play that role? Adopting a
broadly Gricean picture of communication as background the book reviews some main proposals
from the literature and then develops an original line of Argument for a non-standard version
of the view that understanding a sentence consists in possessing propositional knowledge of its
meaning. A key to a satisfactory account of this sort it is argued lies in a particular view
of the nature of propositional attitude states. Apart from dealing successfully with a number
of challenges the resulting account also forms part of an attractive general picture of how
philosophers of language may go about explaining our use and interpretation of language.
