Against (Gricean) intentions at the heart of human interaction

Human communication has long been explained as a speaker's encoding of meanings using linguistic forms, and a hearer's decoding those forms to recover the speaker's meanings. Contemporary theorists in language pragmatics reject this encoding/decoding model as descriptively inadequate. Drawing on Grice's philosophical analysis, they argue instead that communication occurs when the hearer recognizes the speaker's meaning-intention. I argue that intention recognition explanations are likewise descriptively inadequate because they are framed within the same conceptualization of communication as encoding/decoding models. Drawing on a model of communication grounded in empirical research on ordinary conversation, I develop an alternative to the view that intentions and intention recognition lie at the heart of human interaction.