What semantic dementia tells us about the ability to infer others' communicative intentions

Abstract

As Heintz & Scott-Phillips rightly argued, pragmatics has been too commonly considered as a supplement to linguistic communication. Their aim to reorient the study of cognitive pragmatics as the foundation of many distinctive features of human behavior finds echo in the neuropsychological literature on tool use, in which the investigation of semantic dementia challenges the classical semantics versus pragmatics dissociation.