The answer is that all such vocabulary descends from vocabulary that, in its more primitive uses - lexical - would have been capable of relatively straightforward dictionary-style definition or ostensive demonstration. Descendent vocabulary sheds its lexical connections, and sufficiently late descendents may be incapable of being understood at all, except through an historical explanation of their descent. The linguistic uses of a language user of one generation are in part engendered by the linguistic uses of previous generations. But in part, as in biological evolution, vocabulary pre-adapted to one role may be co-opted or exploited in another. 2.2
All, except the earliest, linguistic practices are lacking an accessible semantic account, with vocabulary denoting simple, sensorially immediate items - objects, physical relationships, actions - vocabulary whose use can be conveyed directly by ostension and simple definition, and ultimately, vocabulary that is intimately tied to specific perceptual cues. Such relatively simple vocables are the ancestors of all of the semantically difficult vocabulary of the later stages of a language. All connectives, for example, evolve by various describable stages of logicalization from the sensorially rich, specific vocabulary of physical relationships between individuals, to the sensorially poor, with extremely versatile uses linking whole sentences. For example, the Modern English word but is the descendant of Anglo-Saxon butan (by outan, i.e., outside); or is the descendent of the comparative other (second, as in every other day), and so on. We can now say in some detail how the transformations come about, and corresponding stories can be sought for all of the semantically challenged vocabulary of folk psychology, ethics and religion. At every stage of linguistic history the process of logicalization, and more generally, delexicalization, is in progress. The semantic childhood simplicities of today will engender tomorrow's philosophically adult difficulties. Nonetheless, small children continue to acquire language 2.3 and manage linguistic intercourse with their parents and grandparents. However, by slow degrees, what was the simple vocabulary of childhood in earlier generations passes into less simple linguistic roles within the adult language of later generations. At each stage there is a balance, though in each case a different balance, between the semantically rich and the semantically poor. As applied to the corresponding elements of human language, Immanuel Kantıs [36] remark is born out by the facts: percepts without concepts are blind; concepts without percepts are empty. Language maintains a dynamic balance between what we must directly understand and what we need not understand in order to participate in its practices.
We are not denying that, in the ordinary way, any competent speaker of a language understands that language; there is such a thing as conversational understanding. A master of a language, a good novelist, say, has this sort of understanding to a very high degree. But conversational understanding does not confer any other sort, and depends upon something approaching a semantic understanding only for a portion of the material of speech. It is not the sort of understanding that we strive for in mathematics or physics, biology or history. To put the matter bluntly, much of the understanding exhibited in human conversation is a simulation of understanding. Moreover, it is a sufficiently good simulation to have sent many generations of philosophers haring after semantic theories, even long before truth-tables conjured this late illusion of success.