title: The Mapping between the Mental and the Public Lexicon creator: Sperber, Dan creator: Wilson, Deirdre subject: Pragmatics subject: Philosophy of Language subject: Philosophy of Mind description: We argue that the presence of a word in an utterance serves as starting point for a relevance guided inferential process that results in the construction of a contextually appropriate sense. The linguistically encoded sense of a word does not serve as its default interpretation. The cases where the contextually appropriate sense happens to be identical to this linguistic sense have no particular theoretical significance. We explore some of the consequences of this view. One of these consequences is that there may be many more mentally represented concepts than there are linguistically encoded concepts. publisher: Cambridge University Press contributor: Carruthers, Peter contributor: Boucher, Jill date: 1998 type: Book Chapter type: NonPeerReviewed format: text/html identifier: http://cogprints.org/2280/1/mapping.htm identifier: Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre (1998) The Mapping between the Mental and the Public Lexicon. [Book Chapter] relation: http://cogprints.org/2280/