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  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Il rompicapo della fiducia infantile. Tra psicologia dello sviluppo e pragmatica della comunicazione
    (2022-08-01) ;
    Edoardo Vaccargiu
    Communication is a powerful tool for acquiring novel information. However, belief acquisition via testimony must be buttressed by trust. How does trust develop throughout ontogeny? Which are the cognitive underpinnings of children’s trust towards communication? In this paper, we address these questions by focusing on some controversial data coming from the existing literature in developmental psychology. Specifically, we outline the so-called puzzle of child trust: while children up to the age of four appear to be oblivious to the risk of deception, there is robust evidence for precocious mechanisms of epistemic vigilance in infancy. We address this puzzle by combining a social and a cognitive perspective. Here, we suggest that children’s apparent gullibility is the result of robust expectations of trustworthiness, calibrated to the experience with benevolent caregivers and triggered by the cognitive underpinnings of the interpretation of communicative acts.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Ironic speakers, vigilant hearers
    (2023-04-04) ;
    Nausicaa Pouscoulous
    Verbal irony characteristically involves the expression of a derogatory, dissociative attitude. The ironical speaker is not only stating a blatant falsehood or irrelevant proposition; she is also communicating her stance towards its epistemic status. The centrality of attitude recognition in irony understanding opens up the question of which cognitive abilities make it possible. Drawing on Wilson (2009), we provide a full-fledged account of the role of epistemic vigilance in irony understanding and suggest that it relies on the exercise of first- and second-order vigilance towards the content, the ironic speaker as well as the source of the irony.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Pragmatics and mind reading: The puzzle of autism
    (2021-9-30) ;
    Noveck, Ira
    Mikhail Kissine’s (2021) target article examines autism in order to mine questions about language use and its cognitive underpinnings. Among these, we focus on the question concerning the role of mind reading in language interpretation. Kissine claims that the selective pragmatic profile of highly verbal autistic individuals undermines the existence of an ‘intrinsic link’ between language interpretation and mind reading. We advocate for a more cautious approach based on both theoretical and empirical arguments. Theoretically speaking, data from autism are compatible with the view that language interpretation is the result of a special-purpose form of mind reading, dedicated to the domain of intentional communication. Empirically speaking, the data are neither clear nor consistent enough for making strong claims about what exactly are the communicative challenges of highly verbal autistic individuals.