Pragmatics and Processing

Gricean pragmatics has often been criticised for being implausible from a psychological point of view. This line of criticism is never backed up by empirical evidence, but more importantly, it ignores the fact that G rice never meant to advance a processing theory, in the first place. Taking our lead from M arr (1982), we distinguish between two levels of explanation: at the W ‐level, we are concerned with what agents do and why; at the H ‐level, we ask how agents do whatever it is they do. Whereas pragmatics is pitched at the W ‐level, processing theories are at the H ‐level. This is not to say that pragmatics has no implications for psychology at all, but it is to say that its implications are less direct than is often supposed.