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Wiley InterScience | ||||||||
  Mind & LanguageVolume 21 Issue 1, Pages 74 - 107 Published Online: 10 Feb 2006 Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Abstract | References | Full Text: PDF (Size: 222K) | Related Articles | Citation Tracking  Communication and Folk Psychology The ideas in this paper have been presented at different stages of its development over the past three years. At each stage, I have benefited from helpful comments and criticisms. I am particularly grateful to Deirdre Wilson for stimulating and challenging feedback; and to Milena Nuti whose ideas about cognitive faculties inspired me to think in terms of two stages of folk‐psychological development. I am also grateful to the pragmatics group at University College London who helpfully attended some long presentations of this material; to audiences at the 2001 ESPP conference in Fribourg, Cogsci 2001 in Edinburgh, the University of Trondheim, the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, the University of Seville. Particular thanks go to Robyn Carston, Francois Recanati and Dan Sperber. Two anonymous M&L reviewers also provided helpful comments and suggestions. The paper began life in a discussion with Gillian Brown in Cambridge and I am grateful to her for forcing me to make clear my ideas about utterances. Work on this paper was partly in collaboration with the European Science Foundation EUROCORES programme 'The Origin of Man, Language and Languages', Project 01‐R01: Mindreading and the emergence of human communication. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2006 ABSTRACTAbstract: Prominent accounts of language use (those of Grice, Lewis, Stalnaker, Sperber and Wilson among others) have viewed basic communicative acts as essentially involving the attitudes of the participating agents. Developmental data poses a dilemma for these accounts, since it suggests children below age four are competent communicators but would lack the ability to conceptualise communication if philosophers and linguists are right about what communication is. This paper argues that this dilemma is quite serious and that these prominent accounts would be undermined if an adequate more minimal alternative were available. Just such a minimalist account of communication is offered, drawing on ideas from relevance theory and situation theory. Received: 28 February 2002; Accepted: 09 September 2002; | 
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