Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-reading DAN SPERBER AND DEIRDRE WILSON 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. 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: deirdre@ling.ucl.ac.uk ### 1. Introduction Pragmatic studies of verbal communication start from the assumption (first defended in detail by the philosopher Paul Grice), that an essential feature of most human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, is the expression and recognition of intentions (Grice, 1957; 1969; 1982; 1989a). On this approach, pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in metapsychology, in which the hearer infers the speaker's intended meaning from evidence she has provided for this purpose. An utterance is, of course, a linguistically-coded piece of evidence, so that verbal comprehension involves an element of decoding. However, the decoded linguistic meaning is merely the starting point for an inferential process that results in the attribution of a speaker's meaning. The central problem for pragmatics is that the linguistic meaning recovered by decoding vastly underdetermines the speaker's meaning. There may be ambiguities and referential ambivalences to resolve, ellipses to interpret, and other indeterminacies of explicit content to deal with. There may be implicatures to identify, illocutionary indeterminacies to resolve, metaphors and ironies to interpret. All this requires an appropriate set of contextual assumptions, which the hearer must also supply. To illustrate, consider the examples in (1) and (2): (1) (a) They gave him life. (b) Everyone left. (c) The school is close to the hospital. (d) The road is flat. (e) Coffee will be served in the lounge. (2) (a) The lecture was as you would expect. (bPragmatics, Modularity and Mind-reading DAN SPERBER AND DEIRDRE WILSON 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. 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: deirdre@ling.ucl.ac.uk ### 1. Introduction Pragmatic studies of verbal communication start from the assumption (first defended in detail by the philosopher Paul Grice), that an essential feature of most human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, is the expression and recognition of intentions (Grice, 1957; 1969; 1982; 1989a). On this approach, pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in metapsychology, in which the hearer infers the speaker's intended meaning from evidence she has provided for this purpose. An utterance is, of course, a linguistically-coded piece of evidence, so that verbal comprehension involves an element of decoding. However, the decoded linguistic meaning is merely the starting point for an inferential process that results in the attribution of a speaker's meaning. The central problem for pragmatics is that the linguistic meaning recovered by decoding vastly underdetermines the speaker's meaning. There may be ambiguities and referential ambivalences to resolve, ellipses to interpret, and other indeterminacies of explicit content to deal with. There may be implicatures to identify, illocutionary indeterminacies to resolve, metaphors and ironies to interpret. All this requires an appropriate set of contextual assumptions, which the hearer must also supply. To illustrate, consider the examples in (1) and (2): (1) (a) They gave him life. (b) Everyone left. (c) The school is close to the hospital. (d) The road is flat. (e) Coffee will be served in the lounge. (2) (a) The lecture was as you would expect. (b