This paper addresses the question of the place of pragmatic abilities in the overall architecture of the mind. Until recently, pragmatics was assumed to be part of a non-modular, unencapsulated, central system. Sperber and Wilson (2002) have proposed that pragmatics is to be conceived of as a sub-module of the mindreading module, with its own principles and mechanisms. This is in line with an increasingly modular view of the mind (Cosmides & Tooby 1992, 1994; Sperber 1994b, 2001, 2005; i.a.), according to which cognition consists of many dedicated domain-specific mechanisms or ‘conceptual modules’, highly interconnected with each other. This paper focuses on the connection between the pragmatics module and epistemic vigilance mechanisms, that is, mechanisms that assess the quality of the incoming information and the reliability of the individual who dispenses it (Sperber et al. 2010). The latter take as their proprietary input the output of the pragmatics module and assess its believability. This paper makes two original proposals: first, that epistemic vigilance mechanisms may directly affect the comprehension process, and, second, that the emergence of epistemic vigilance mechanisms targeted at assessing the communicator’s competence and benevolence may correlate with different developmental stages in pragmatics.
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