One or two systems?

There is much that is common between the view so far presented and ‘relevance theory’. The emphasis upon the psychological dimension of utterance interpretation, and the rejection of Minimalism, are among the important features that the two frameworks share. But there are also some differences.

One difference that has been recently the focus of attention on the part of relevance theorists is this. According to me, the primary pragmatic processes involved in comprehension are not ‘inferential’. Only when the unreflective, normal process of interpretation yields weird results does a genuine inference process take place whereby we use evidence concerning the speaker's beliefs and intentions to work out what he means. There is no doubt that our ability to do so is an important part of our conversational competence, but the question at issue is: how essential is that inferential ability? Can linguistic communication proceed without it, at some basic level, or is it from the very start constituted by it? Following Millikan and Burge, I reply that communication is not constitutively inferential. As Burge writes,