Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-reading

The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain. ___________________________________________________________________________ We would like to thank the participants in the Mind & Language Workshop on Pragmatics and Cognitive Science, and in particular Robyn Carston and Sam Guttenplan, for valuable comments and suggestions. Address for correspondence: Deirdre Wilson, Department of Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. Email: [email protected]