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.

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Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-reading

The handbook of pragmatics , The handbook of pragmatics , کتابخانه دیجیتال جندی شاپور اهواز

Handbook of Pragmatics

© Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber 2012 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, 1989) 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):

Pragmatics, modularity and mindreading

The present work documents how the logic of a model's demonstration and the communicative cues that the model provides interact with age to influence how children engage in social learning. Children at ages 12, 18, and 24 months (n=204) watched a model open a series of boxes. Twelve-month-old subjects only copied the specific actions of the model when they were given a logical reason to do so--otherwise, they focused on reproducing the outcome of the demonstrated actions. Eighteen-month-old subjects focused on copying the outcome when the model was aloof. When the model acted socially, the subjects were as likely to focus on copying actions as outcomes, irrespective of the apparent logic of the model's behavior. Finally, 24-month-old subjects predominantly focused on copying the model's specific actions. However, they were less likely to produce the modeled outcome when the model acted non-socially.

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Copying Actions and Copying Outcomes: Social Learning through the Second Year.

Recent studies have demonstrated infants’ pragmatic abilities for resolving the referential ambiguity of non-verbal communicative gestures, and for inferring the intended meaning of a communicator’s utterances. These abilities are difficult to reconcile with the view that it is not until around 4 years that children can reason about the internal mental states of others. In the current study, we tested whether 17-month-old infants are able to track the status of a communicator’s epistemic state and use this to infer what she intends to refer to. Our results show that manipulating whether or not a communicator has a false belief leads infants to different interpretations of the same communicative act, and demonstrate early mental state attribution in a pragmatic context.

Seventeen‐month‐olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others’ referential communication

Although observational learning by children may occur through imitating a modeler's actions, it can also occur through learning about an object's dynamic affordances--a process that M. Tomasello (1996) calls "emulation." The relative contributions of imitation and emulation within observational learning were examined in a study with 14- to 26-month-old children. The effectiveness of a "ghost" condition, in which the effective operation of the means apparatus was seen to occur without human agency, was compared with that of a standard modeling procedure in which the child saw an experimenter demonstrate the means action. The ghost condition was as likely to encourage observational learning as was the modeling condition; indeed, performance in the ghost condition was significantly better. The role of emulation in the development of observational learning is discussed in the context of a possible form of goal directedness without agency.

Doreen E. Thompson

Papers

The ghost condition: imitation versus emulation in young children's observational learning.

Children's understanding that utterances emanate from minds: using speaker belief to aid interpretation.

Memory Development in the Second Year: For Events or Locations?.