The explanatory project of Gricean pragmatics

The Gricean paradigm in pragmatics has recently been attacked for its alleged lack of explanatory import, based on the claim that it does not seek accounts of how utterance interpretation actually works, but merely of how it might work. This article rebuts this line of attack by offering a clear and detailed account of the explanatory project of Gricean pragmatics according to which the latter aims for rationalizing explanations of utterance interpretation. It is shown that, on this view, Gricean pragmatics seeks psychological explanations of utterance interpretation that are “cognitively real” in a perfectly clear and robust sense.