ABSTRACT
This chapter further develops the implications in the preceding chapter our understanding of language and communication. The hearer is an active participant whose role is not merely that of recovering the message from the speaker by trying to reconstruct the latter’s intention. The hearer has to first of all recognize that there is indeed a speaker present and from there, decide on just what kind of speaker they are interacting with. This includes deciding what kinds of capacities to attribute to the speaker and consequently, how to construe the message that is emanating from that speaker. These are non-trivial matters that follow from more fundamental considerations such as whether to bestow personhood and intentionality, and concomitantly, a mind, to the speaker – considerations that, ultimately, depend on how the hearer frames the communicative event in question.
