At the heart of human communication: new views on the complex relationship between pragmatics and Theory of Mind

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'.