Dogmas of understanding

Abstract

Investigators of language understanding have made a number of idealizations in order to study it, but many of these idealizations have turned into dogmas—convictions that are impervious to evidence. Because of these dogmas, investigators have often ignored, dismissed, or ruled out of court common features of everyday language such as indirect meaning, word innovation, phrasal utterances, interjections, listener roles, listener background, specialized lexicons, joint actions by speakers and addressees, disfluencies, changes of mind, gestures, eye gaze, pretense, and quotations. I describe eleven common dogmas of understanding, some evidence against them, and some of the dangers they pose for the study of understanding. Using language is fundamentally social, I argue, and social features appear to influence understanding at many, perhaps most, levels of processing.