Human Communication
This is the working title of a book I have been writing for a very long time, and which (as of late 2026) is finally nearing completion. I am revising the manuscript at the moment, so if you would like to read the next coherent version, email me and I'll put you on my list of people to send it to.
The central thesis of the book is that humans often communicate by revealing their intentions to produce psychological effects in their addressees. This was Grice's idea, he defended this by formulating necessary-and-sufficient conditions on what it takes for someone to mean something by an utterance, and I don't think that's a good way to do things. Instead, I think that we need to give an explanatory and empirically grounded theory of the psychological states and processes involved in human communication, which explains both how we communicate and why we do it that way. Much of the book is taken up by an extended argument we form communicative intentions—intentions to produce psychological effects in our addressees by revealing the intention to do so—because of the roles that these intentions play in a powerful and efficient strategy for communicating with others. I do this by arguing that communicative intentions play important roles in the larger plans that allow us to customize what we say and how we say it for our addressees, that allow us to strike the right balance between utterances that are over and under-informative, given our purposes, and that allow us to organize our conversations into cooperative and coherent joint activities.
I have sometimes posted drafts of chapters here in the past, but I am taking those old drafts down for now. But here is a basic outline of the book's five chapters:
Introduction
Human communication is powerful and flexible in a number of ways that stand in need of special explanation. Syntax and compositional semantics are just one of these, but they interact with the others. The ambition of this book will be to explain the others by appeal to the idea that humans engage in intention recognition.
1. Revealing Intentions
I introduce the book's central claims: human communication is special in that it often takes the form of intention recognition, which relies on our unique capacities for mindreading, planning, and language.
2. Designing Communicative Acts
Humans' powerful ability to design communicative acts for their addressees is best explained by understanding how communicative intentions are embedded in our broader plans.
3. Planning Conversations Together
Conversations are governed by shared conversation plans. This makes human communication more efficient, and explains why we try to reveal our intentions to one another.
4. Setting the Terms of Communicative Success
Although communicative intentions are components of the larger plans that guide our speech, they are special. It is the communicative intention, and not the downstream selection of linguistic conventions, that decides which responses from an addressee would count as successful communication.
5. Degrading Gracefully
Intention recognition, and the sophisticated forms of planning and mindreading on which it depends, are functional defaults. When we fall back on less sophisticated alternative ways of communicating, this is a kind of graceful degradation---a backup plan that is less powerful and sophisticated, but that works often enough that it's better than nothing.
What Makes Human Communication Special?
This used to be chapter 1, but I have cut it. Some parts of it now show up in the introduction. I am leaving it here because I know a few people have made use of it.