Encapsulation, inference and utterance interpretation

Abstract

While utterance interpretation is standardly understood as context-sensitive inference, there are prima facie reasons to doubt it is fully unencapsulated. First, utterance interpretation is normally fast and automatic, while it has been argued that unencapsulated processes are slow and reflective. Secondly, certain illusions appear to show that the processing of utterances is unrevisable in light of further information. I argue that these reasons are not conclusive, and utterance interpretation relies on indefinite tracts of background knowledge and contextual information.