As Heintz & Scott-Phillips rightly argued, pragmatics has been too commonly considered as a supplement to linguistic communication. Their aim to reorient the study of cognitive pragmatics as the foundation of many distinctive features of human behavior finds echo in the neuropsychological literature on tool use, in which the investigation of semantic dementia challenges the classical semantics versus pragmatics dissociation.

In this paper, I argue that descriptive information associated with concepts plays a relevant role in the performance of different cognitive tasks, as suggested by Descriptivist Theories of Concepts (DTC). However, I argue that it does not follow that such information determines the extension of concepts, as also suggested by DTC. In support of these claims, I present an analysis of empirical evidence offered by cases of semantic dementia. According to this interpretation of such evidence, the information associated with concepts (...) is part of the cognitive content of concepts. It is involved in different cognitive tasks, but such evidence does not support the thesis that it is possible to determine the intentional content, i.e., the extension of a concept from the cognitive content, since to do so would face the objection of ignorance. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 295-310, April 2022.