Gricean metacommunication

Three main approaches exist for finessing the cognitive demands of Grice's model of communication (a notorious problem): namely, deflationism , modularity , and interpretivism . Here, I consider each in light of human metacommunication, a phenomenon that has been neglected in foundational discussions of Gricean communication. This neglect is surprising, as metacommunication is central to human communication and is also something quite young children appear to engage in. I argue that metacommunication bears upon the plausibility of these three approaches very differently. More specifically, both deflationism and an intuitive version of the modularity approach are significantly challenged. Interpretivism, in contrast, is left unaffected.