Bambini Valentina, Lecce Serena
Laboratory of Neurolinguistics and Experimental Pragmatics (NEPLab), Department of Humanities and Life Sciences, University School for Advanced Studies IUSS, Pavia 27100, Italy.
Department of Brain and Behavioural Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia 27100, Italy.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2025 Aug 14;380(1932):20230486. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2023.0486.
A puzzling issue in cognitive science is whether human communication is mainly a matter of decoding words or a matter of understanding other people's mental states. This issue becomes especially intriguing when we consider that verbal communication is often non-literal, with language being just a cue to infer intended meaning, as in the case of irony and metaphors. Pragmatics is the cognitive ability dealing with understanding a speaker's intended messages in the context of use, and its relationship with the ability to read other people's minds, i.e. Theory of Mind (ToM), has been a largely debated topic in the past twenty years across a number of research domains investigating human communication. This theme issue offers fresh evidence on this debate from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives (including linguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience), methodological approaches (both experimental and theoretical) and populations (typical and atypical children and adults, as well as artificial networks). It covers a variety of pragmatic phenomena, both expressive and receptive, such as metaphor, irony, reference, implicature, storytelling and question asking. In this Introduction, we go back to the definition of pragmatics and ToM, highlight their nuanced nature and sketch the scenario in which the debate over their relationship arose. After summarizing the different articles, we highlight the flexible-at times unstable-nature of the relationship between pragmatics and ToM as it emerges from this collection, which offers the most mature and up-to-date view of the sociocognitive roots of human communication.This article is part of theme issue 'At the heart of human communication: new views on the complex relationship between pragmatics and Theory of Mind'.
认知科学中一个令人困惑的问题是，人类交流主要是对词语进行解码的问题，还是理解他人心理状态的问题。当我们考虑到言语交流常常并非字面意义上的，语言只是推断意图意义的一个线索，比如在反讽和隐喻的情况下，这个问题就变得格外引人入胜。语用学是一种认知能力，用于在使用情境中理解说话者的意图信息，在过去二十年里，它与解读他人心理的能力，即心理理论（ToM）之间的关系，一直是众多研究人类交流的领域中备受争议的话题。本专题从广泛的学科视角（包括语言学、发展心理学和认知神经科学）、方法论途径（实验性和理论性的）以及人群（典型和非典型儿童与成人，还有人工网络）提供了关于这场辩论的新证据。它涵盖了各种语用现象，包括表达性和接受性的，如隐喻、反讽、指称、含义、讲故事和提问。在本引言中，我们回顾语用学和心理理论的定义，强调它们细微的本质，并勾勒出关于它们之间关系的辩论产生的情景。在总结不同文章之后，我们强调从本论文集所呈现出的语用学和心理理论之间关系的灵活——有时不稳定——的本质，它提供了关于人类交流社会认知根源最成熟和最新的观点。本文是专题“人类交流的核心：关于语用学和心理理论之间复杂关系的新观点”的一部分。
