Abstract
The relationship between pragmatic theory and psychological plausibility has been a topic of long debate and recent increased controversy. Grice himself was arguably concerned with the economy and philosophical coherence of his theory of conversation more than with the specific cognitive processes of communicating individuals, but nevertheless Gricean pragmatics has been criticised for lacking psychological reality. Some recent pragmaticists identify psychological plausibility as the defining criterion of success for a pragmatic theory, while others argue that the distinction between semantic and pragmatic meaning need not be psychologically available to ordinary language users. Meanwhile, much of the research carried out in the relatively new field of ‘experimental pragmatics’ evaluates and compares pragmatic theories in terms of the empirical evidence for their psychological plausibility.
This chapter offers a critical assessment of this debate, which can in effect be understood as the question of whether the role of the pragmaticist is to ‘read the mind’ of the hearer interpreting an utterance in context. I consider in particular the evidence available for Grice’s original attitude to these issues, the various claims that have been made about them in subsequent work in pragmatics, and the questions raised and problems posed by the empirical data presented by experimental pragmatics. I argue that the role of ‘mind reading’ in pragmatic theory should be treated with caution, and that apparent success in relation to it should not be viewed as a universally appropriate measure for assessing pragmatic theories.
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Chapman, S. (2017). Is Pragmatics About Mind Reading?. In: Depraetere, I., Salkie, R. (eds) Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32247-6_4
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