Irony and metarepresentation

This paper considers how two recent accounts of verbal irony – the pretence account and the echoic account – can explain a range of experimental results on the nature of irony and the differences between irony and metaphor. Of particular interest is the fact that irony comprehension correlates with success in standard second-order falsebelief tasks, and therefore requires a higher order of metarepresentational ability than metaphor comprehension. I consider two interpretations of what these tasks reveal – the standard mindreading account and a more recent epistemic account proposed by Mascaro and Sperber (2007, in press), and argue that the data on irony comprehension tend to support the epistemic rather than the mindreading account.