Ruth Millikan

“Linguistic communication is wholly dependent on the prior idiosyncratic manners in which its speakers and hearers have previously come to grasp the contingent world patterns to which words dumbly point. The link that conveys something of the contents of the world through a speaker’s linguistic token and on to a hearer’s understanding is wholly indirect, passing mandatorily through whatever has been separately understood by speaker and hearer of the structure of the world itself. This might be put by saying that a pragmatic understanding of language goes absolutely all the way down. There is no such thing as mere linguistic understanding. Understanding language is buried in understanding the world as a whole.”
― Ruth Millikan