Pragmatics, modularity and mindreading

© Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber 2012. Introduction Pragmatic studies of verbal communication start from the assumption (first defended in detail by the philosopher Paul Grice) that an essential feature of most human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, is the expression and recognition of intentions (Grice 1957, 1969, 1982, 1989). On this approach, pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in metapsychology, in which the hearer infers the speaker’s intended meaning from evidence she has provided for this purpose. An utterance is, of course, a linguistically coded piece of evidence, so that verbal comprehension involves an element of decoding. However, the decoded linguistic meaning is merely the starting point for an inferential process that results in the attribution of a speaker’s meaning. The central problem for pragmatics is that the linguistic meaning recovered by decoding vastly underdetermines the speaker’s meaning. There may be ambiguities and referential ambivalences to resolve, ellipses to interpret, and other indeterminacies of explicit content to deal with. There may be implicatures to identify, illocutionary indeterminacies to resolve, metaphors and ironies to interpret. All this requires an appropriate set of contextual assumptions, which the hearer must also supply. To illustrate, consider the examples in (1) and (2):