Conditionality in individual minds: An argument for a wholly pragmatic approach to utterance interpretation

•I defend a wholly pragmatic approach to utterance interpretation.•I investigate the role of pragmatics in determining the falsity of a conditional.•The analysis suggests lack of context-independent processing stage for conditionals.•I argue that conditionality lies in inferred thought, not in linguistic semantics.•I argue that utterance interpretation is a wholly pragmatic inferential process.

There is a growing body of research which undermines the traditional dual-processing model of utterance interpretation, whereby pragmatic inference is preceded by the context-independent process of linguistic decoding. This body of research suggests that utterance interpretation is a wholly pragmatic inferential process. In this paper, I seek to defend a wholly pragmatic approach by investigating the role of the purported process of context-independent decoding and the process of pragmatic inference in determining when a conditional is false. I show that material conditionality, like all kinds of conditionality, lies in pragmatically derived holistic thought, i.e. not in any putative linguistic semantics.