The Experimental Turn in Philosophical Pragmatics

Modern pragmatics has been defined as “philosophical” pragmatics, not only because its main representative authors, such as John Austin (1962) and Paul Grice (1989), were philosophers of ordinary language, but also because it has used linguistic and philosophical analysis as the key method to give an explanation of the communicative features of language. If we consider language in general as an object of analysis, on the one hand, psychological language models have focused on aspects that are studied through an empirical method: phonological and syntactic modules, models of acquisition and memorization or “storage” of lexis, biological foundations of language, etc. On the other hand, philosophical models have mainly focused on the notion of meaning and rhetorical-pragmatic aspects of verbal communication. This gap, which has deep-rooted historical origins, still persists in theories of language and in the approaches and methods of such theories, including pragmatics. As Ira Noveck and Dan Sperber stated in their ground-breaking volume (2004), the understanding of language in context has been studied by two disciplines – pragmatics and psycholinguistics – even though there has been little communication between them. However, in the last years, plenty of studies have brought classical pragmatic theories in front of the tribunal of experience to test their power of explanation and prediction. The result has been the growth of a flourishing interdiscipline, called “Experimental