Assertion and Mindreading

Pragmatic accounts of assertion commonly assume that language users engage in some form of mindreading. For example, Stalnaker proposed that the critical context for any assertion is the set of pragmatic presuppositions that can be taken as shared between speaker and addressee—that is, their common ground. From a cognitive psychological perspective, though, the processing and representational requirements of considering common ground are substantial. This chapter considers several cognitively oriented descriptions of mindreading in communication, contrasting the metarepresentational requirements of speaker meaning with the more general psychological construct of false belief in theory of mind. Ultimately, the cognitive demands of real-time conversation may circumscribe the ability of language users to engage in sophisticated forms of mindreading during the communication of assertion.