Pragmatics is the study of language in context, a study we rely on in order to elucidate how utterances have meanings in situations and is the study that explains why the use of a language is distinct from, but complementary to, the language itself seen as a formal system. In linguistics and philosophy, this has typically involved topics such as deixis and indexical reference, presupposition, implicature, and speech acts. In psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this has involved studying figurative language comprehension in healthy adults and in neurologically impaired patients. In anthropology and sociology, this has involved microanalysis of the interactional basis of communicative activity. One way to define pragmatics is to examine what people who claim to be studying pragmatics actually do. This course will present pragmatics within an overall program for studying language as a communication system, and is related to undertakings in all of the disciplines that contribute to cognitive science. We deal mainly with the extent to which language interpretation and production depends on language users’ reflexive assumptions and inferences about each other.