According to contextualists, communication has to do with pragmatically adjusted content, not with conventional meaning. This pragmatic content is sometimes identified with speaker meaning or with the thought the speaker intends to express. I will argue that given the sociolinguistic role of utterance content—the fact it provides reasons for action, liabilities and entitlements—locutionary content should not be modelled as a variety of speaker meaning.

Stephen Pinker sets out over a dozen arguments in The language instinct (Morrow, New York, 1994) for his widely shared view that natural language is inadequate as a medium for thought. Thus he argues we must suppose that the primary medium of thought and inference is an innate propositional representation system, mentalese. I reply to the various arguments and so defend the view that some thought essentially involves natural language. I argue mentalese doesn't solve any of the problems Pinker cites (...) for the view that we think in natural language. So I don't think I think the way he thinks I think. (shrink)

The network theory of conceptual development is the theory that conceptual developmentmay be represented as a process of constructing a network of linked nodes. The nodes of such a network represent concepts and the links between nodes represent relations between concepts. The structure of such a network is not determined by experience alone but must evolve in accordance with abstraction heuristics, which constrain the varieties of network between which experience must decide. This paper criticizes the network theory on the grounds (...) that current proposals regarding these abstraction heuristics all fail, and further, that, given certain plausible assumptions, no viable account of these abstraction heuristics will be possible. Abstraction heuristics cannot be universal principles of rational thought because virtually no concept is intrinsically unsuitable for use in a true and useful representation of reality. Nor can they be species-specific natural conventions because in that case, it is argued, we would not be able even in principle to learn to understand the language of creatures who used different ones. (shrink)

In an ordinary interaction, communicants have various, mostly unconscious goals which reflect their interactional, social and personal needs. In these interactions, people’s minds try to find a balance between reaching these goals and consuming cognitive energy. If a speaker puts too little effort into speech production, she risks not achieving her communicative goals. This is especially typical when the atmosphere is relaxed, a good example of which is family discourse. An analysis of recorded conversations shows that there are certain regular (...) manifestations of risk-taking in family discourse, such as expressing immature thoughts, raising a large variety of topics and overguessing. A substantial amount of risk-taking in family discourse is in one way or another connected with false confidence in the interlocutors’ common ground. Family members know each other well, which results in an overestimation of the similarity of their understanding of words and objects. This attitude leads them to use cryptic, hard-to-comprehend speech. Quick, everyday interactions are mostly automated, and the speakers do not recognise that their speech is full of implicitness and underdeterminacy. (shrink)