Metarepresentation in linguistic communication

Abstract

© Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber 2012. Introduction Several strands of research on metarepresentation have a bearing on the study of linguistic communication. On the whole, there has been little interaction among them, and the possibility of integrating them with an empirically plausible pragmatic theory has not been much explored. This chapter has two main aims: to illustrate the depth and variety of metarepresentational abilities deployed in linguistic communication, and to argue that a pragmatic account of these abilities can both benefit from and provide useful evidence for the study of more general metarepresentational abilities. A metarepresentation is a representation of a representation: a higher-order representation with a lower-order representation embedded within it. The different strands of research on metarepresentation that have a bearing on the study of linguistic communication vary in the type of metarepresentations involved and the use to which they are put. First, there is the philosophical and psychological literature on mindreading (or ‘theory of mind’), which deals with the ability to form thoughts about attributed thoughts (Whiten 1991; Davies and Stone 1995a, 1995b; Carruthers and Smith 1996). Suppose a child sees a ball being put into a box. Having formed the thought in (1), he might go on, by observing his companions, to form thoughts of the type in (2): The ball is in the box. There is a now a substantial body of work on how this metapsychological ability develops and how it can break down. It may be present to varying degrees. People may differ, for example, in their ability to attribute to others beliefs incompatible with their own. A child who believes (1) and lacks this ability would be limited to the metarepresentations in (2a) and (2c). A child with first-order ‘theory of mind’ could attribute to others beliefs that differ from his own (as in (2b)); and one with second-order ‘theory of mind’ could attribute to others beliefs about the beliefs of others which differ from his own (as in (2d)) (Leslie 1987; Astington, Harris and Olson 1988; Frye and Moore 1991; Fodor 1992; Gopnik and Wellman 1992; Lewis and Mitchell 1994; Smith and Tsimpli 1995; Scholl and Leslie 1999). People with autism are typically said to be lacking in first- or second-order metapsychological abilities of this type (Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith 1985; Leslie 1991; Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg and Cohen 1993; Happe 1993, 1994; Baron-Cohen 1995).