[Book Review] Review of Mazzone, Marco - Cognitive pragmatics : mindreading, inferences, consciousness (de Gruyter Mouton)

Abstract

Cognitive Pragmatics: Mindreading, Inferences, Consciousness is a culmination of Marco Mazzone's original, thought provoking and highly prolific theoretical research over the past few years. In it, the author explicates, further develops and defends a novel approach to cognitive pragmatics, which starts from the premise that pragmatic inference can be couched in entirely associative terms. The upshot of Mazzone's argumentation in this regard is that the hierarchical organization of memory in terms of schemata is sufficient on its own to account for the way in which inferential processing is implemented by a mechanism of associative activation that travels through our entire network of mental representations. Now, given the traditional juxtaposition of associative and inferential processes in cognitive psychology, even this statement alone should be enough to strike many as perplexing or even downright contradictory, and this is something that Mazzone is well aware of. That is why he focuses much of his effort in several parts of the book on establishing that, contrary to their traditional treatment as means of exclusively unsophisticated low-level processing, associations can also be conceived of as more contentful memory schemata that can be activated in both a bottom-up and top-down manner. It is thus under this particular conception that associative activation is suggested by Mazzone to wholly underlie pragmatic inference at the neuropsychological level. [Excerpt]