Neuropragmatics: brain and communication.

Our field of research is cognitive pragmatics, that is, the theoretical and empirical study of the mental events involved in human communication. Communication is a form of social activity; more precisely, it is an agent’s intentional and overt attempt to affect a partner’s mental states (Airenti, Bara, & Colombetti, 1993a, 1993b; Tirassa, 1997). While, historically, this area used to have no specific relationship with the neurosciences, our work is aimed at a convergence that seems to us capable of yielding valuable results. Theories in pragmatics are typically analytical and developed on autonomous grounds; the neurosciences, and in particular the neuropsychology of mind/brain impairments, provide them with a natural empirical test bed. While, of course, the pathology of a cognitive function may always shed an interesting light on its physiology, in the case of communication this research strategy is made almost necessary by the intricacies of doing experimental pragmatics in the normal, healthy adult. Different neuropsychological diseases will affect communicative performance in different ways, depending on what relevant cognitive subsystems are damaged and how. Competing theories of communication make different statements as to the nature of these subsystems and of their interconnections and therefore yield different predictions as to the patterns of their decay. It thus becomes possible to compare and to possibly falsify them. The same line of reasoning, transferred to normal development, also suggests to study the acquisition of communicative abilities in the child. Neuroscience and pragmatics have quite distinct roles in this enterprise, the former being somewhat ancillary to the latter: given a powerful theory