Meaning, Communication and Theory of Mind

The study of language, meaning and communication in the cognitive sciences has undergone a kind of conceptual inflation in the past twenty years or so. Not only has the very nature of human communication come to be seen as, in many respects, Gricean, but also linguistic meaning itself has come to be widely regarded in terms of the effect of language use on mental states. As a result, a more or less explicit assumption about the conceptual abilities of agents who have linguistic and communicative competence has been adopted in a variety of disciplines ranging from language acquisition to formal semantic theories: that these agents have the ability to represent and make inferences about the mental states of others. The purpose of this paper will be to offer considerations in support of the contrary, more minimalist view that neither meaning nor communication involve the representation of mental states essentially. Correspondingly, agents who are competent with regards language use and communication need not possess metacognitive abilities.