Chapter 2 focuses on how major twentieth century developments such as the move from World to Mind, the emergence of so-called ‘cognitivist’, ‘mind-internal’ or ‘psychologistic’ accounts and the subsequent move from semiotic codes to pragmatic inference may radically alter perspectives on human linguistic communication and the interplay between literature, language and mind. Among other things, this chapter reassesses the theoretical and epistemological legacy of behaviourism, semiotics and postmodernism for literary criticism and the arts, contrasts the semiotic presuppositions of much literary theory with Chomsky’s work as well as recent work in pragmatics, and defends the view that linguistic pessimism can be seen as a backward effect of semiotic, postmodernist and behaviourist theoretical models on the way literary individuals evaluate introspective data.