Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind‐reading

TLDR

Pragmatics faces the challenge that sentence meaning often leaves speaker intent ambiguous. The study argues that pragmatic interpretation is a specialized mind‑reading process, not merely general theory‑of‑mind applied to language. The authors propose a dedicated comprehension module with specific principles and mechanisms that could have evolved to support pragmatic inference.

Abstract

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.