New directions for research on pragmatics and modularity

This paper considers the relation between the pragmatic abilities used to interpret communicative behaviour and more general mind-reading abilities used to interpret ordinary actions. According to the classical Fodorian view [J. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983], pragmatics and mind-reading are central cognitive systems which are used to attribute mental states to others on the basis of general-purpose reasoning abilities. I will outline an alternative, relevance-theoretic account on which mind-reading is a dedicated inferential module, and pragmatics is a sub-module of the mind-reading module, with its own special-purpose principles and mechanisms.