RT list: question to D Wilson

I have been reading

New directions for research on pragmatics and modularity.

A propos of dedicated modules, a friend of mine has had a stroke and
received damage in the brain:

as a result (among other things), she can no longer read or write written
texts - yet we can speak fluently and understand as any other normal human
being (with the difference that she gets tired ).

So, should we deduce there is a module or submodule for written symbols?

Now a question to D Wilson:

suppose that interrpetation e of utterance U in context C can be obtained
through two different strategies:

Inference through central systems: we call e'

Inference through a dedicated inferential module : we call e''

In order to avoid having two different processes for the same inference,
we need to say that e' is slower than e'' and that once e'' is ready, the
mechanims resulting in e' is blocked.

Presumably cognitive effort is involved in this.

But can we exclude cases when the two processes converge and one process
checks what the other has done?

Also we need to specify when the central system processes prevail - that
is when conscious inferential mechanisms are activated.

alessandro
Received on Tue Jun 2 11:41:48 2009