Journal of Pragmatics 11 (1987) 561-588 561

North-Holland

MUTUAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF

CONVERSATIONAL INFERENCE

Raymond W. GIBBS, Jr.*

This paper examines the role of mutual knowledge in a psychological theory of conversational
inference. Contrary to recent proposals, I argue that speakers and listeners must coordinate what
they mutually know in order to comprehend utterances. Mutual knowledge is not only a result of
comprehension, but it is a prerequisite for it as well. I review recent arguments on this issue and
outline why mutual knowledge is necessary for listeners to draw the right inferences from what is
said in conversation. This is especially important if a theory of conversational inference is to meet
the criteria of a psychologically real model of human language behavior.

1. Introduction

Recent inquiries into understanding how people derive what is meant from
what is said in conversation have generally assumed that listeners make use of
various extralinguistic information. For example, consider the following brief
conversation.

(la) Would you like a piece of cake?

(lb) Im on a diet.

Understanding that ( lb) is meant as a refusal of the offer stated in (la)

requires that listeners go through a chain of reasoning regarding the speakers
intentions because (lb) does not follow logically from the question in (la).
Most current theories of conversational inference appeal to the idea that con-
versation is a cooperative venture, governed by certain rules which constrain
how listeners determine the intended implications of any utterance. Implicit in
this view is the assumption that speakers and listeners must share knowledge of
each others beliefs and attitudes which guides not only how speakers design

* Preparation of this article was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of
California, Santa Gruz. I wish to thank Kevin Brailey, Robert Cox, Gayle Gonzales, Rachel
Mueller, Guy Van Orden, and Patrick Whitnell for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Authors address: R.W. Gibbs, Jr., Program in Experimental Psychology, Clark Kerr Hall,
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, USA.

037882166/87/$3.50 0 1987, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)

562 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. 1 Mutual knowledge

their utterances to meet the specific demands of their audience, but also how
listeners figure out the right inferences to make from speakers utterances.
My purpose in this article is to assess the role of mutual knowledge and
beliefs in a psychological theory of conversational inference. I will attempt to
support what I call the mutual knowledge hypothesis, which assumes that listen-
ers use the knowledge and beliefs they share with speakers in the process of
interpreting utterances in conversation. The idea that mutual knowledge plays
some role in conversational inference is widely assumed (see Bach and Harnish
(1979), Clark (1985), Brown and Yule (1983), Leech (1983), Levinson (1983));
however, there is little direct psychological evidence to support such an assump-
tion. One of my aims is to briefly review some of the existing data, as well as to
present some new empirical findings, which support the mutual knowledge hypo-
thesis. I will also suggest that many kinds of utterances can not be interpreted
without explicit reference to the shared beliefs existing between speakers and
listeners.
A related goal is to challenge what I call the relevance hypothesis, recently
formulated by Sperber and Wilson (1982,1986), and Wilson and Sperber (in
press) which suggests that problems inherent in establishing mutual knowledge
are great enough so that utterance interpretation may work without the benefit
of mutual knowledge. Although the relevance hypothesisstill characterizes con-
versation as essentially cooperative, it suggests that utterance interpretation can
be explained by a single Principle of Relevance which works without appeal to
the notion that speaker and listeners mutually assume certain knowledge and
beliefs. I shall demonstrate that there are a number of difficulties with the
relevance hypothesis and will conclude that it is premature to accept this alterna-
tive theory of utterance interpretation as a psychologically valid model of
conversational inference.

2. Conversational inference: The standard view

How do listeners make the right inference about what is meant in conversation?
Consider again, the exchange in (la,b).

(la) Would you like a piece of cake?

( lb) Im on a diet.

What is the chain of reasoning that allows a hearer to recognize that (lb) is
meant as a refusal of the offer in (la)? Perhaps the most influential model of
how listeners derive inferences during utterance interpretation is that proposed

I will use the terms knowledge and belief somewhat interchangeably throughout this article,
although it should be noted that belief is a wider term than knowledge (Hintikka (1962)).
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 563

by Grice (1975,197s). Grice noted that much of the information that is con-
veyed from speaker to listener in conversation is implied, rather than asserted.
Grice argued that speakers and listeners expect each other to interpret their
utterances as if they were acting in a rational and cooperative manner. He
recognized several kinds of cooperation which he grouped into the maxims of
Quantity (make your contribution as informative as needed); Quality (do not
say what you believe to be false); Relevance (be relevant), and Manner (be
perspicuous, avoid ambiguity). Although Grice (19751978) does not argue that
this list is exhaustive, he suggests that these maxims describe the norms speakers
operate with in conversation.
In Grices approach, conversational inference (or implicature) involves
taking the meaning of the sentence uttered, in conjunction with background
knowledge, inference rules, and the above set of general pragmatic maxims, to
work out what the speaker might have meant. More specifically, Grice
(1975,1978) suggested that the conversational implicature of an utterance might
be determined as follows:

(24 A speaker said that p.

(2b) There is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims.
(24 He could not be doing this unless he thought that q.
(24 He knows (and knows that I know he knows) that I can see that the
supposition that q is required.
(2e) He has done nothing to stop me thinking that q.
cm He intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that q.
c-k) And so, he has implicated that q.
To show how such a scheme would work, consider ( la,b), restated here,
spoken in the context of a small dinner party.

( la) He: Would you like a piece of cake?

(lb) She: Im on a diet.

Taken literally, (lb) fails to answer the previous question, and would seem
to violate the maxims of Quantity and Relevance. One might expect (lb) to
be interpreted as a non-cooperative response. Yet it is clear that despite the
apparent failure of cooperation, most people normally assume that (lb) is
cooperative at some deeper level. We do this normally by asking ourselves what
possible connection there would be between the offer of some cake and the
assertion in ( 1b) that the speaker is on a diet. We can infer here that the speaker
of (lb) probably does not want a piece of cake in virtue of her diet, and
consequently we can view ( 1b) as implicating something like (3) :

(3) She doesnt want any cake.

564 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge

According to Grice one of the defining features of conversational inference is

that no implicature can be deduced from the explicit content of the utterance
alone. That is, (3) can not be strictly derived from ( 1b) alone. Many re-
searchers, following Grice, have explicitly assumed that the recovery of implica-
tures is a probabilistic and inductive procedure (Bach and Harnish (1979),
Leech (1983), Levinson (1983)). As Brown and Yule (1983) note, listeners
may be capable of deriving a specific conclusion (4~) from specific premises (4a)
and (4b) via deductive inference, but people are rarely in such a situation in
ordinary discourse.

(4a) If its sunny, its warm.

(4b) Its sunny.
(4c) So, its warm.

Instead, listeners are more likely to make inferences about a speakers meaning
inductively, based on socio-cultural knowledge (see Gumperz ( 1982)). Consider
the following example (5) taken from Brown and Yule (1983: 34).

(5) John was on his way to school.

If we take a formal, deductive view of this declarative sentence, we would arrive

at the following entailments.

(6a) Someone was on his way to school.

(6b) John was on his way to someplace.
(6~) Someone was on his way to somewhere.

But listeners usually infer more from (5) than the set of inferences in (6a-c),
including that John is probably a schoolboy. Consider the utterance in (7).

(7) Last week he was unable to control the class.

When (5) is followed by sentence (7), listeners or readers usually derive a

different inference that John is really a school teacher. The inferences necessary
to interpret utterances like (5), as well as those like (3), appear to be derived in
a loose, probabilistic manner, rather than through a more formal, deductive
procedure.
Grices account of the chain of reasoning used in utterance interpretation
involves two basic assumptions. First, he does not mean to suggest that the
literal meaning of an utterance must be semantically anomalous or contradic-
tory. All that is required is that a sentences literal sense be analyzed and viewed
as contextually improbable. Second, and most important, the whole process of
conversational inference is subject to the constraints imposed by the partici-
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 565

pants beliefs and assumptions, including the beliefs the participants have about
each others beliefs and assumptions. Having decided that something is being
conveyed over and above what has been said, the listener has to infer what this
is on the basis of contextual information shared with the speaker. But what
constitutes this shared or mutual knowledge?
In the past, the concept of mutual or shared knowledge has been considered
as part of the analysis of speaker meaning and convention in philosophy (Lewis
( 1969) Schiffer ( 1972)). By definition, a speaker S and an addressee A mutually
know a proposition P if and only if

(8) S knows that P

A knows that P
S knows that A knows P
A knows that S knows that A knows P
. . . and so on ad infinitem

This original definition of mutual knowledge raises a serious paradox. The

infinite series of beliefs statements is seen as necessary, although it is highly
unlikely that listeners can compute an infinite series of these propositions in a
finite period of time. How then do speaker and listener ever coordinate what
they mutually believe if there is always one more belief statement to be estab-
lished (see Bach and Harnish (1979), Harder and Kock (1976))? Furthermore,
how do listeners determine which pieces of knowledge of the many shared with
their speakers are to be used in interpreting utterances? These concerns have
been widely discussed within linguistics and philosophy (see Bennett (1976),
Kempson ( 1975) Stalnaker (1978)). A recent, and dramatic, solution to these
problems, suggested by Sperber and Wilson (1982), is to abandon the idea that
mutual knowledge plays any significant role in conversational inference.

3. Conversational inference: The relevance hypothesis

Sperber and Wilson (1982,1986), and Wilson and Sperber (in press) argue that
conversational inferences can be worked out deductively and done so without
mutual knowledge. They attempt to demolish the validity of the notion of
mutual knowledge as a viable part of a theory of communication by suggesting
that even if mutual knowledge can be truly established between speaker and
listener, which they argue is unlikely, this does not tell us (a) what role it
plays in the interpretation process, and (b) how particular items of mutual
knowledge are selected for the interpretation of utterances. Sperber and
Wilsons alternative account posits that the selection of contextual assumptions
used in utterance interpretation can be constructed without reference to mutual
knowledge.
566 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge

Sperber and Wilson (1986) acknowledge that any account of human commu-
nication must incorporate some notion of shared information. They argue that
there are a set of facts or assumptions which an individual is capable of men-
tally representing and accepting as true which correspond to his or her cognitive
environment. To the extent that any cognitive environment is manifest to two
or more individuals, then there is a mutual cognitive environment. The idea
of mutual manifestations differs from mutual knowledge or mutual as-
sumptions because to say that an assumption is mutually manifest is a
claim about cognitive environments rather than mental states or processes. As
Sperber and Wilson (1986: 45) state Human beings somehow manage to
communicate in situations where a great deal can be assumed about what is
manifest to others, a lot can be assumed about what is mutually manifest to
themselves and others, but nothing can be assumed to be truly mutally known
or assumed. When people communicate, they ostensively intend to alter the
cognitive environments of their addressees. Every act of ostensive communica-
tion carries with it a guarantee of relevance, and this fact, which Sperber and
Wilson call the Principle of Relevance, makes manifest the speakers ostensive
intentions.
The Principle of Relevance generally states that speakers try to be as relevant
as possible in a given situation. This single principle presumably can handle the
full range of phenomena @rices maxims were designed to explain. Formally,
Wilson and Sperber (in press) define relevance as follows:

(9) A proposition P is relevant in a context Cr. . . C, if and only if P has at least

one contextual implication in Cr. . . C,.

The idea is that a listener who wants to establish an utterance as relevant

should look for a context in which that utterance will interact to yield contex-
tual implications. Consider, for example, the exchange in (lOa,b).

(10a) He: Can Susan drive a Buick?

( lob) She: She can drive any car.

On what ground might the speaker of (lob) have thought her utterance to be
relevant to the listener? Wilson and Sperber assume that the speaker in (10a)
would not have asked his question if he had not had a context immediately
accessible in which the information that the addressee could (or could not)
drive a Buick would be relevant. By providing this information directly, the
addressee would therefore be satisfying the Principle of Relevance. Nonetheless,
the speaker in (lob) does not provide the information directly, and the listener
must supply the contextual assumption in ( 1 la) in order to derive the conclu-
sion in ( 1 lb).
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 561

( 1 la) A Buick is a car.

( 1 lb) Susan can drive a Buick.

Although most pragmatic theories assume that the context for comprehen-
sion of an utterance is determined in advance, Sperber and Wilson argue that
the determination of the context is not a prerequisite for comprehension, but a
result of it. They suggestthat the search for the interpretation of which an
utterance will be viewed as most relevant involves a search for the context that
will make this interpretation possible. The listener constructs an interpretation
by looking at what contextual implications can be derived from the initial
context provided by the interpretation of the immediately preceding utterance
in the conversation. If the resulting inferences fail to satisfy the Principle of
Relevance, the listener can then go further back in the conversation and add
that information to the context. The listener may also add encyclopedic knowl-
edge from memory to the concepts mentioned in the utterance itself. The infor-
mation in a given encyclopedic entry is only accessed, however, via the presence
of that concept being in a set of propositions currently being processed. For
example, the utterance in (lob) gives the hearer immediate access to his encyclo-
pedic entry for car, which should in turn provide access to various propositions
of the form (12a-c).

(12a) A Volkswagen is a car.

(12b) A Mercedes is a car.
( 12~) A Buick is a car.
. . . and so on.

Wilson and Sperber (in press) state that given normal assumptions about the
organization of memory, the previous mention of a Buick in (1 la) should act
as a prompt, making (12~) the most accessible proposition. The speaker of
(lob) assumes that her utterance is relevant since she expected it to be processed
in a context where ( 12~) was a contextual assumption which yielded ( 11 b) as a
contextual implication. In each case, there is no need for the listener to worry
whether these additions to the context are mutually known or believed by the
speaker.
Generally, the more contextual implications a proposition has in some con-
text, the more relevant it will be, and, all other things being equal, the greater
processing effort required to derive these implications, the less relevant it will
be. Processing effort is determined by three main factors: (1) the complexity of
the utterance (the more complex the utterance the greater the processing effort);
(2) the size of the context (the larger the context, the greater the processing
effort), and (3) the accessibility of the context (the less accessible the context,
the greater the processing effort). Sperber and Wilson suggest, then, that there
568 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. 1 Mutual knowledge

is a trade-off between maximizing contextual implications and minimizing

processing effort during the interpretation of utterances.

4. Problems with the relevance hypothesis

Sperber and Wilsons (1986) thesis that conversational inferences can be deter-
mined without mutual knowledge, but via some appeal to the idea of mutual
cognitive environments along with the Principle of Relevance seems, at first
glance, to be a reasonable one. However, on closer examination their approach
suffers from some of the same difficulties they wish to remedy. After all, if there
is a problem establishing some knowledge or beliefs as being mutually known,
then there should be similar problems in recognizing that some cognitive envi-
ronment is mutually manifest. Sperber and Wilson argue, nonetheless, that the
notion of what is manifest to an individual is weaker than the idea of something
being actually known or assumed and that something can be manifest without
really being known. For example, the fact that Ronald Reagan and Noam
Chomsky have never played billiards together is probably not, until now, an
assumption known to you, but is an assumption that is manifest to you. Simi-
larly, you may hear a car passing in the street, and because you have not paid
attention to it, you have no knowledge of it, or assumptions about it. But the
fact that a car is passing in the street is manifest to you.
The alleged distinction between some things being known and others only
being manifest is crucial to Sperber and Wilsons view of utterance interpreta-
tion. Consider the following example (Sperber and Wilson (1986: 43)). Mary
and Peter are looking at a landscape when Mary notices a distant church and
says ( 13) to Peter:

( 13) Ive been inside that church.

According to Sperber and Wilson, Mary does not ask herself whether Peter has
noticed the building, and whether he assumes she has noticed, and assumes she
has noticed he has noticed and, so on. Nor does Mary ask herself whether Peter
has assumed that the building is a church or whether he assumes that she
assumes that it is, and so on. All Mary needs is reasonable confidence that Peter
will be able to identify the building as a church when required (i.e. that a certain
assumption will be manifest in his cognitive environment at the right moment).
But, Peter need not have made any of these assumptions before Mary said what
she did.
Theissue of what kinds of experience constitute knowing or assuming as
opposed to merely being manifest is a delicate one. Yet making a distinction
between something being known and other things being manifest to someone
might artificially create a difference where none exists. Speakers and listeners
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 569

possess tacit knowledge which is difficult to consciously access, as in our know-

ledge of grammar. But, we still think of our knowledge of grammar, for
instance, as knowledge no matter how tacit it may seem. Even though
this knowledge is somewhat indeterminate and difficult to specify as a set of
mutually-held propositions, this doesnt imply that speakers and listeners are
unable to mutually recognize the existence of this shared knowledge. Listeners
do not have to consciously access a relevant assumption before a speaker says
something like ( 13) in order to comprehend an utterance, as long as it is
mutually known to both parties that the listener is capable of utilizing this
tacitly shared information at the right moment. The possession of this mutual
knowledge, whether tacitly held or otherwise, does not guarantee that commu-
nication will always be successful. No failsafe algorithm exists for verbal com-
munication and problems in assuming what is mutually known will, of course,
result in various miscommunications, particularly when part of this mutual
knowledge is tacit and difficult to specify in a propositional form.
My main contention, then, is that Sperber and Wilson are sneaking mutual
knowledge in the backdoor of their theory of conversational inference by
appealing to the idea of mutual cognitive environments which can be manifest
but not known. At a psychological level, it appears that Sperber and Wilson
have adopted a framework for describing verbal communication which cru-
cially depends on the very concept that they wish to abandon.
Nonetheless, it is important, for the moment, to accept Sperber and Wilsons
claim that utterance interpretation can work without mutual knowledge and go
on to seriously consider the psychological consequences of their proposal. The
relevance hypothesis poses a direct challenge to psychologists interested in
human language processing because it suggests a process-model of how people
derive conversational inferences. It remains to be seen, though, whether or not
the relevance hypothesis can meet the requirements of a psychological theory.
Although Sperber and Wilson are explicitly concerned with utterance interpre-
tation as a psychological issue, they overlook crucial psycholinguistic evidence
which casts doubt on the validity of the relevance hypothesis. In what follows,
I review some of this evidence and outline some recent experimental findings
that support, instead, the mutual knowledge hypothesis. Experimentally testing
the predictions of either the relevance hypothesis or the mutual knowledge hypo-
thesis is a difficult problem; nevertheless, the weight of the available evidence
goes against aspects of the relevance hypothesis, enough so to question its value
as a psychological theory of conversational inference.
The first task facing a listener in understanding an utterance, according to
Sperber and Wilsons relevance hypothesis is to identify its propositional form.
Of course, the idea is to recover the correct propositional form, one which is
intended by the speaker. Sperber and Wilson (1986) suggest the propositional
form a listener wants to recover is that which is consistent with the Princ@e of
Relevance. They assume that the initial parse of a sentence begins in some sort
570 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge

of input module (in Fodors (1983) sense), which results in its literal, context-
free, representation. This propositional representation is subsequently exam-
ined by a central processor containing general encyclopedic information in
order to find a context in which that proposition is viewed as most relevant.
Generally, sentences are considered to have specific semantic representations,
or literal meanings, with as many semantic representations as there are ways in
which a sentence is ambiguous.
This sketch of how utterances are initially processed to form propositional
representation is somewhat problematic and can be criticized on psychological
grounds (see Gibbs (1982,1984)). An immediate difficulty arises when a speaker
says an utterance that is not literally well-defined. Consider the following set of
indirect directives (14a,b).

(14a) Get in, whycha?

(14b) Sit over here, ya wanna?

Ervin-Tripp (1976) has noted that indirect directives spoken with casual pro-
nunciation, like (14a,b), are abundant in both childrens and adults speech. It
is unlikely that understanding such requests requires listeners to first expand
these utterances to their full grammatical forms to analyze their literal meanings
before figuring out their intended interpretations. Similarly, it seems implaus-
ible to suggest that other innovative phrases and expressions, such as (15a,b),
must be fully expanded into complete literal sentences before being understood.

(15a) John porched the newspaper.

(15b) John did a Napoleon for the camera. (Meaning: John posed for the
camera with one hand tucked inside his jacket a la Napoleon.)

Many metaphoric utterances, such as (16), are also not well-formed in the
strictly literal sense.

(16) You are the cream in my coffee.

And Nunberg (1979) has shown how reference can transcend the literal mean-
ing of some sentences, such as (17), which a waiter might use to designate the
customer who ordered a ham sandwich.

* Sperber and Wilson (1986: 186) leave open the issue of when context inhibits the generation of
inappropriate inferences. They allude to the possibility that sentence decoding works in a clause-by-
clause manner where the input module submits the possible interpretations of a sentences first
constituent to a central processor which decides which interpretation is most plausible or relevant.
This sketch of the comprehension process still assumes that there is some stage of linguistic
processing where the meanings of the individual words are accessed and combined to form a literal
representation.
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 571

( 17) The ham sandwich is waiting for his check.

Sperber and Wilsons assumption that conversational inference begins with an

obligatory parse of a sentences context-free, literal meaning to identify its
propositional form obviously would have great difficulty with these aspects of
conversation. It is difficult to imagine how the relevancy of an utterance can be
determined if its literal meaning cannot be uniquely described.
Even if it is presumed that a literal description of a sentence can be uniquely
determined, there is much evidence from psycholinguistic studies to suggest that
people do not always process the literal meanings of utterances before deriving
their conveyed interpretations. There are a class of theories called serial-pro-
cess models for understanding nonliteral speech (Gibbs ( 1982,1984)), which
suggest that understanding many kinds of figurative discourse, such as indirect
requests (Clark and Lucy (1975), Gordon and Lakoff (1971), Grice (1975),
Searle ( 1975)), idioms (Bobrow and Bell ( 1973)), irony and sarcasm (Clark and
Clark (1977), Cutler (1974), Grice (1978), Searle (1979)), and metaphors
(Searle ( 1979)) involves a series of steps. Thus, when a speaker says (18),

( 18) The Raiders massacred the Redskins.

the listener must (a) compute the literal meaning of the utterance, (b) decide
if the literal meaning is the intended meaning of the utterance, and (c), if the
literal meaning is inappropriate for the specific context, compute the conveyed
or metaphoric meaning via a cooperative principle or by the rules of speech
acts.
Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds and Antos (1978) tested the psychological impli-
cations of this model by having subjects read sentences like (19) in either a
literal or metaphoric context.

(19) Regardless of the danger, the troops marched on.

If the predictions of serial-process model are correct, subjects should take

longer to process sentences like (19) in metaphorical contexts than in literal
ones. Presumably, when people determine the literal meaning of (19) in a literal
context they are essentially done. On the other hand, once the literal meaning
of (19) is determined in a metaphorical context, listeners must go on to derive
the utterances nonliteral interpretation. This extra processing should result in
subjects taking longer to read (19) when it is used metaphorically than when it
is intended literally. Ortony et al.% (1978) alternative hypothesis was that given
sufficient context subjects would not analyze the literal interpretations of the
metaphorical sentence before deriving their intended, metaphorical meanings.
Subjects should therefore take no longer to read metaphorical sentences
than to read literal ones. The results of Ortony et al.s study showed this to be
512 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge

true. However, when subjects read the target sentences with minimal context,
metaphorical targets took significantly longer to read than literal sentences.
These results strongly demonstrate that context plays a crucial role in the
interpretation of metaphoric language. With sufficient linguistic and social con-
text, people understand the nonliteral interpretations of metaphoric utterances
directly without first analyzing their putative literal meanings. Similar findings
have been reported for interpreting other kinds of figurative utterances, such
as indirect requests (Gibbs (1979,1982,1983,1984)), idioms (Gibbs (1980)
Swinney and Cutler ( 1979)), proverbs (Kemper ( 198 l)), and sarcasm (Gibbs
(1986a,b)). Other studies have even demonstrated that people are unable to
ignore metaphorical meanings when they are explicitly instructed to verify their
literal meanings (Glucksberg, Gildea and Bookin ( 1982)).
In general, understanding utterances whose intended meanings depart from
their literal interpretations does not necessarily introduce any additional
difficulty. If people do not automatically analyze the literal meanings of utter-
ances, then Sperber and Wilson are incorrect in assuming that conversational
inferences (conveyed meaning) can be determined by finding a contextual
assumption which makes some proposition (or literal meaning) most relevant.
Making the right inferences about speakers ostensive intentions can be done
in an expectation-driven manner (Riesbeck and Schank (1978)) so that people
can infer exactly what is meant directly by relying on a contextual frame-
work partially composed of the knowledge and beliefs shared by speakers and
listeners.
It is surprising that Sperber and Wilson do not refer to this large body of
psycholinguistic research on figurative language understanding in their discus-
sion of the importance of relevance for interpreting metaphor and irony (Sper-
ber and Wilson (1986)). For example, Sperber and Wilson regard irony as one
of a variety of utterance types in which the speaker does not express his or her
belief, but echoes the beliefs of someone else, and perhaps, expresses his or her
attitude to those beliefs. Compare (20a,b) and (21a,b)

(20a) He: Its a lovely day for a picnic.

[They go for a picnic and the sun shines.]
(20b) She: It is a lovely day for a picnic, indeed.
(21a) He: Its a lovely day for a picnic.
[They go for a picnic and it rains.]
(21b) She: Its a lovely day for a picnic, indeed.

In each instance, the response in (b) echoes the opinion expressed in (a).
However, the speaker of (20b) clearly endorses the opinion in (20a), but the
speaker of (2 1b) is ridiculing the opinion in (2 1a). The utterance of (2 1b) is seen
as ironic because its point is to show how silly the speaker of (21a) was to hold
his opinion. Sperber and Wilson ( 198 1,1986) argue that there is no more reason
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 513

to regard irony as a violation of pragmatic maxims or principles than there is

to see the echoic (20b) or (21b) as violations. In each case, the appropriate
interpretations will depend, as always, on the Principle of Relevance.
The relevance hypothesis does not explain that listeners must share enough
information to be able to recover the source of what is being echoed, particu-
larly in cases where the source of the echo is based on a distant event or vague
social norm. A speaker would not state an echo unless he or she assumed that
the listener shared enough knowledge to locate the source of the echo and thus
see a sentence like (21 b) as ironic. In fact, it is speakers knowledge of who does
and who does not share certain information that makes it possible to have
victims of sarcasm or irony. For example, a speaker at a social gathering may
overtly compliment an addressee by saying (22).

(22) Your dress is just perfect.

Although the addressee may take (22) as a compliment, and acknowledge it as

so, the speaker of (22) could really intend his utterance sarcastically to mean that
the addressees attire is inappropriate for the occasion. Other conversational
participants, or overhearers, who share the speakers beliefs recognize, perhaps
consciously so, that the speaker is being sarcastic, unbeknown to the victim.
The difficulty the relevance hypothesis has in explaining how listeners recog-
nize when a person is or is not speaking ironically also poses similar problems
for the interpretation of ambiguous expressions. Consider the utterance in (23).

(23) His food is not hot enough.

The relevance hypothesis proposes that there are general processing principles
determining the accessibility of senses and referents which should enable the
speaker to predict with some confidence the order in which interpretations of
(23) are likely to come to a listeners mind. Exactly what is meant by accessibil-
ity here is unclear, although Wilson and Sperber (in press) state that psycholin-
guistic research has shown that certain meanings of ambiguous words and
phrases are more common and accessed more quickly than other meanings. The
word hot in (23) for example, will refer to the temperature so that (23) will
mean something like His food is not warm enough to eat, rather than a spicy
interpretation of hot. Presumably, the context may make it immediately acces-
sible to anyone there that the food served was not hot enough and should have
enough contextual implications to satisfy the Principle of Relevance.
However, the correct interpretation of ambiguous words and phrases de-
pends on information other than which meanings are most accessible from
semantic memory. This is particularly true in cases where speaker and hearer
share certain idiosyncratic information about each others beliefs and attitudes
(cf. Gerrig (1986)). For instance, in a situation where two people are eating
514 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge

at a Mexican restaurant, and it is mutually known that the speaker in (23) loves
his food spicy hot, the listeners interpretation of (23) will immediately be that
the food is not spicy enough for the speakers taste. Most importantly, the
speaker of (23) knows that he can state this utterance with the understanding
that the listener will take the mutually held belief about spicy food into account
when interpreting (23). It is this coordination between speaker and listener
which makes for the easy interpretation of ambiguous utterances such as (23),
not simply that certain interpretations of ambiguous phrases and words are
more accessible from semantic memory. Kess and Hoppe (1985) review a vari-
ety of experiments which show that the interpretation of ambiguous lexical
items, such as hot, are indeed affected by context. This contextual information
is composed of both common knowledge and other idiosyncratic shared
knowledge that exist between particular speakers and hearers.
As with ambiguous language, the search for the acceptable interpretations of
most metaphors will involve a large range of cultural conventions and mutually
held beliefs, some of which may be quite idiosyncratic to particular people and
contexts. In many instances of conversation, a speaker will not merely fall back
on what can be generally taken to be shared, nor will s/he simply tailor his/her
utterance to the mind of the listener. Instead, the speaker will be inclined to
select from whatever s/he shares with the other person just those topics that
allow him/her to employ allusive phrases that only the recipient will immedi-
ately understand. Clark (1983) provides examples of such phrases, called
contextual expressions. Thus, if two people use the word teapotted to mean
something unique such as rubbing the back of someones leg with a teapot,
then the expression in (24) can only by interpreted correctly by people who
share this intimate knowledge.

(24) John teapotted the policeman.

Similar to my earlier remarks on the problem of interpreting utterances that are

not literally well-defined, there are many instances of shared nomenclature,
sometimes thought of as slang, which cannot be understood without reference
to particular pieces of information shared by specific speakers and listeners.
This section has reviewed from a psychological perspective some of the
difficulties with Sperber and Wilsons relevance hypothesis. I have argued that
Sperber and Wilsons (1986) appeal to mutual cognitive environments is quite
similar, if not identical, to the concept of mutual knowledge. Despite their
claims that mutual cognitive environment is a weaker notion than the concept
of mutual beliefs and knowledge, they have failed to demonstrate that it is a
qualitatively different view. In any event, even if one assumes that mutual
knowledge is not necessary for comprehension, there is much psychological
evidence which is not in accord with many of the basic assumptions underlying
the relevance hypothesis. The weight of this evidence suggests that it may be
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 575

premature to accept the relevance hypothesis as a reasonable model of the

psychological processes used in working out conversational inferences. Never-
theless, many of Sperber and Wilsons difficulties with the mutual knowledge
hypothesis remain and at this point it is necessary to consider in more detail
whether or not mutual knowledge is possible to establish.

5. Is mutual knowledge possible?

An important justification for Sperber and Wilsons abandonment of mutual

knowledge in their theory of conversational inference is that establishing
mutual knowledge requires an infinite set of assertions. Given the large amount
of information shared by members of the same community, it is not possible to
check whether each shared belief has a possible role in the comprehension of an
utterance. But is there anyway to avoid this difficulty?
Clark and Marshall (198 l), and see Clark and Carlson ( 1982) have
attempted to show that mutual knowledge can be established in practice by
arguing that the apparent paradox of mutual knowledge is based on two incor-
rect assumptions. The first is the assumption that mutual beliefs must be repre-
sented in a mental model as an infinite series of belief statements. Clark and
Marshall ( 1981) suggest that mutual beliefs can be represented as an unanalyz-
able concept of the form:

(25) A and B mutually know that p, if and only if some state of affairs G holds
such that:
(a) A and B have reason to believe that G holds.
(b) G indicates to each of A and B that the other has reason to believe that
G holds.
(c) G indicates to A and B that p.

G is called the basis for the mutual knowledge that p. Essentially, if A and B
make certain assumptions about each others rationality, they can use certain
states of affairs as a basis for inferring the infinity of conditions all at once.
There is no need to confirm each and every one of the infinity of conditions,
even though in practice this can be attempted. Clark and Marshalls mutual
induction scheme prevents the infinite number of iterations usually seen as a
necessary consequence of establishing mutual knowledge.
Clark and Marshall also note a second, and related, assumption regarding
mutual knowledge. This assumption suggests that mutual beliefs can only be
inferred for infinitely many pieces of evidence, one piece for each belief stated.
Once again, Clark and Marshall argue (also see Lewis ( 1969), Schiffer (1972))
576 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. 1 Mutual knowledge

that only one piece of evidence is really needed to establish some mutual belief
as long as it is the right kind of evidence. For example, if A and B agree before
a foot race to start running when a gun fires, this agreement can serve as the
only grounds necessary for their mutual beliefs that the firing of a gun is when
they are both to start running. It can be formalized by the mutual induction
scheme as follows:

(264 Aand B have reason to believe that the agreement holds that they will
both start running when the gun fires.
G6b)The agreement indicates to A and B that A and B each have reason to
believe that the agreement holds.
(26~) The agreement indicates to A and Beach that the firing of a gun indicates
that they are to start running.

These three conditions provide the grounds for A and B to individually

infer the mutual belief that they are to start running when the gun is fired.
There is no need to draw on a potentially infinite number of pieces of
evidence.
But what counts as the grounds G which are used as the basis for the mutual
induction scheme? Clark and Marshall propose that people ordinarily rely on
three kinds of co-presence heuristics as evidence for inferring mutual beliefs.
The first source is linguistic co-presence. Here the listener takes as common
ground all of their conversation up to and including the utterance currently
being interpreted. A second source for common ground is physical co-presence.
Here the listener takes as common ground what s/he and the speaker are
currently experiencing and have already experienced. The final source of evi-
dence is community membership. This includes information that is universally
known in a community and can be represented by mental structures such as
frames (Minsky (1975)), scripts (Schank and Abelson (1977)), and schemata
(Rumelhart and Ortony ( 1977)), etc. Moreover, it also covers mutually known
conventions governing the phonology, syntax, and semantics of the sentence
uttered.
Normally, mutual knowledge is established by some combination of physical
or linguistic co-presence and mutual knowledge based on community member-
ship. Whatever the case, these co-presence heuristics show that mutual induc-
tion can occur without having to rely on an infinite number of pieces of
evidence. People search for evidence that they, their listener, and the objects
they refer to are openly present together, physically, linguistically, or indi-
rectly (Clark and Marshall (198 1)). With this evidence they can infer mutual
knowledge directly by means of the induction scheme. Clark and Marshalls
idea shows that mutual knowledge can be viewed as a single mental entity,
instead of an infinitely long series of more complex mental entities.
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 517

6. Is mutual knowledge necessary?

Although linguists, philosophers, and psychologists have stressed the impor-

tance of context for utterance interpretation, there is little explicit discussion of
what constitutes the context for comprehension. The most significant difference
between the mutual knowledge hypothesis and the relevance hypothesis concerns
their contrasting views on the role of previous knowledge in the process of
interpreting language. Sperber and Wilsons relevance hypothesis suggests that
conversational inferences can be deductively derived via the use of context,
including the listeners knowledge of the speaker and their mutual cognitive
environment. The mutual knowledge hypothesis, on the other hand, proposes
that knowledge of the context and knowledge of the speaker are not always
sufficient for successful comprehension. Instead, making conversational infer-
ences must involve knowledge and beliefs that listeners and speakers mutually
share.
Which hypothesis best characterizes the psychological process of making
conversational inferences? Certainly, it would be most parsimonious if the
psychological theory could rely solely on the beliefs a listener had about the
speaker without having to further infer which of these beliefs are mutually
shared. Is this simpler view of the context for comprehension sufficient?
The relevance hypothesis proposes that the search for an interpretation on
which an utterance will be the most relevant involves a search for the context
which will make the interpretation possible. In other words, determination of
the context is not a necessary condition for the comprehension of utterances;
rather, the act of interpreting an utterance is in itself context-creating. The
listener relies on background knowledge in understanding speakers utterances,
but there need be no assumption that this knowledge is mutually known before-
hand. To illustrate this point of view Sperber and Wilson (1982: 70) offer the
following example and analysis.

Bill, while travelling in Southern Europe, offers a cigarette to a peasant whom he believes to be
ignorant. The peasant answers No thank you, I have read the latest statistics. Bill is surprised, but
understands correctly that the peasant wants him to take as part of the context the fact that the
latest statistics show that smoking is hazardous to ones health, and to infer from the context and
the peasants answer the reason why his offer of a cigarette is declined. (Of course, Bill cannot be
sure that this is what the peasant meant.) As a result of this act of comprehension, the fact that
smoking is hazardous becomes mutually assumed to be known.

Thus, according to the relevance hypothesis, Bill is able to understand the

meaning of the peasants utterance by creating a context in which that utterance
is seen as being most relevant. Having done this, new information becomes
mutually established between speaker and listener, but mutual knowledge itself
is not a prerequisite to understanding the peasants statement.
578 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge

Contrary to Sperber and Wilsons proposal, it seems unlikely that listeners,

such as Bill, can correctly understand a speakers utterance without some
mutual knowledge. One argument for this is that background knowledge is
itself highly structured and clearly related to, if not inseparable from, a listen-
ers knowledge of language (Gibbs ( 1984)). As Quine ( 1953) argues with his
inextricability thesis, it is impossible to clearly distinguish between linguistic and
factual considerations in assessing the truth of a statement, which also suggests
that it is difficult to distinguish our beliefs about a statement due to its logical
form and general shared knowledge. Thus, understanding the peasants
response in the above scenario (No thank you, I have read the latest statistics)
can only be done if it is mutually assumed that Bill knows which statistics the
peasant is referring to. Although Bill may not know that the peasant knows that
Bill knows this, the peasants statement reflects his assessment of what both of
them mutually know. Without some appeal to the notion of mutual knowledge,
the peasants use of the term statistics would be nothing more than a guess as
to whether Bill was capable of knowing what was meant. Furthermore, it is not
necessary that Bill be consciously aware of this information in advance of the
peasants statement. All that matters is that the peasant believes that Bill is
capable of using this knowledge at the right moment because it was assumed to
be mutually known.
Even if it is assumed that mutual knowledge is not a prerequisite for compre-
hension, but a result of comprehension, speakers and listeners still must do
something with the mutual knowledge that is established once an utterance is
comprehended. Is this newly established mutual knowledge ever utilized during
comprehension? If so, when? The relevance hypothesis suggests that listeners
must disassociate what they mutually believe with the speaker while they are
interpreting any subsequent utterances the speaker makes. Suppose we continue
the above scenario so that the peasant goes on to say (27).

(27) After all, cigarettes are like time bombs.

It is absurd to think that the on-line interpretation of this metaphorical utter-

ance does not take advantage of the previously established mutual knowledge
between Bill and the peasant. Listeners do not ignore what is mutually estab-
lished to form a literal representation of a sentence. Instead, listeners use what
is mutually known at the earliest stages of linguistic processing, which con-
strains the way an utterance is interpreted. There is yet another puzzling aspect
of the relevance hypothesis. According to Sperber and Wilson, the fact that
some knowledge is considered mutual is generally a result of comprehension
ratherthan a preconditon for it. Mistakes in comprehension are much more
likely to cause a wrong assessment of mutual knowledge than the other way
around. But consider this unfortunate scenario. Two friends in California are
 R.W. Gibbs, Jr. 1 Mutual knowledge 579

going to a conference in Boston. They decide to drive to the airport together

and one says to the other (28).

(28) Lets leave for the airport at noon.

Understanding of the definite reference the airport in (28) may appear to be

a trivial problem, but it requires that the two friends both mutually recognize
which airport is being referred to (similar to recognizing which statistics the
peasant was referring to). In this case, there are two airports nearby, and each
person (unbeknownst to the other) actually is supposed to fly out of a different
one. It was only after they started heading toward one airport that it becomes
clear that there has been a misunderstanding, specifically due to each persons
incorrect assumption that some proposition was mutually known (i.e. what
airport they were going to). The interpretation of mundane utterances such as
(28) shows that mutual knowledge is necessary in order to insure that the
definite reference in (28) will be properly understood. Sperber and Wilson
(1982) suggest that situations like the one in which (28) occurs are unnatural
and that such misunderstandings are unlikely to occur. But scenarios like this
one are not uncommon and demonstrate that misunderstandings do occur
because of the failure to correctly coordinate speakers and listeners mutual
beliefs. Misunderstandings of this type are frequently noted in native/nonnative
speakers conversation where the participants roughly speak the same language,
but do not have the same underlying beliefs and cultural knowledge (see
Varonis and Gass (1985)).
Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the mutual knowledge
hypothesis and the relevance hypothesis concerns the constraints each places on
the kinds of inference generated during utterance interpretation. Consider the
following exchange:

(29a) He: Are you going to the party tonight?

(29b) She: I hear Jacks coming.

Although (29b) is considered an appropriate answer to the question in (29a),

in different circumstances it would convey different answers. For example, on
the assumption that the speaker of (29b) likes Jack, the implied answer will be
yes, whereas on the assumption that she wants to avoid him the implied answer
will be no. The interpretation of (29b) is context-dependent. The relevance
hypothesis suggests that understanding (29b) requires that the listener find a
context where (29b) is viewed as most relevant. The fact that the listener knows,
for example, that the speaker of (29b) doesnt like Jack, should be enough
according to the relevance hypothesis for hearers to deduce that (29b) really
means that she wont be going to the party.
580 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge

This characterization of what constitutes the true context for interpreting

(29b) seems adequate. My argument, though, is that the listener in this situa-
tion must not only utilize a context which includes information about what
the speaker believes, he must also recognize that the speaker of (29b) knows
that he knows this as well. When the speaker of (29b) says what she did, she
meant to inform the listener that she was not going to the party. Successful
interpretation of (29b) demands that the listener make this inference about
what the speaker meant. But recognition of the speakers intention is of a
special kind, what Grice (1968) called m-intention. An m-intention is a speak-
ers intention to produce an effect in the listener by means of the hearers
recognition of that intention. The speaker of (29b) wants the listener to recog-
nize her intention to not go to the party in part by means of the listeners
recognition of that intention. If the listener successfully recognizes this inten-
tion, he will have drawn the authorized inference (Clark ( 1977)). Any other
inferences drawn, like that the speaker wants to go to the party, are unautho-
rized or not m-intended. As Grice (1975) argued, the cooperative principle
is a device for enabling listeners to draw only inferences authorized by the
speaker. Simply arguing that understanding utterances, such as (29b), can
be accomplished by a single Principle of Relevance leads to the generation
of both authorized and unauthorized inferences. Although the relevance hy-
pothesis may generate numerous contextual implications, each of which could
be equally and maximally relevant, it fails to distinguish between conversa-
tional inferences that are m-intended from inferences that are unauthorized.
As Clark ( 1982) points out, Sperber and Wilson ( 1982) are incorrect in as-
suming that the relevance hypothesis retains the flavor of Grices cooperative
principle since Grice (1975) refers only to m-intended inferences as being
cooperative.
Sperber and Wilson (1986) recognize the necessity of viewing communica-
tion as a process of recovering speakers intentions as shown in their definition
of ostensive-inferential communication ( 1986: 63):

(30) The communicator produces a stimulus which makes it mutually manifest

to communicator and audience that the communicator intends, by means
of this stimulus, to make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set
of assumptions.

This definition, as Sperber and Wilson acknowledge, does not preclude the
possibility of unintentional communication including unauthorized contextual
implications not specifically intended by the speaker. Some of these unintended
inferences may be desirable as in the case of poetic effects where the listener/
reader derives a large array of weak implicatures in the ordinary pursuit of
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 581

relevance.3 The issue of which implicatures are intended and which are not is
complex, but necessary to deal with. A major goal for a psychological theory of
conversational inference is to specify how listeners figure out which inferences
are intended and authorized by speakers. Peoples ability to distinguish
between authorized and unauthorized inferences shows that intentionality is
a key aspect of ostensive-inferential communication. Although Sperber and
Wilson (1986) comment that it is easy enough to modify definition (30) and
make intentionality a defining feature of communication, it is not at all clear
how this modification can be made without acknowledging the specific role
mutual knowledge has on the determination of m-intended inferences.

7. Recent experimental evidence

The results of numerous psychological studies have shown that people use
contextual knowledge during language interpretation, some of which were
reviewed earlier in this article. These studies do not, however, carefully distin-
guish between the larger set of previous knowledge a listener may have about
a speaker from the smaller set of knowledge that is mutually shared by speaker
and listener. Recently, there has been an explicit attempt in psycholinguistics to
directly examine the role of mutual knowledge and beliefs in the processes of
speaking and listening. The aim of this section is to briefly review two of these
studies and to show how their results support the predictions of the mutual
knowledge hypothesis.
The first study isconcerned with the role of mutual knowledge in demonstra-
tive reference. When referring to objects or other people in the world, there are
a number of special devices available for referring to what we are talking about.
Speakers can use definite descriptions as in (31a), indefinite descriptions as in
(3 1b), and personal pronouns as in (3 lc).

(3 la) The man you saw this morning.

(3 1b) A dog in the bushes.
(3 lc) He, you, we.

But how do we choose which device to use? Suppose that I point to a group of
school children and tell you (32).

3 In discussing the relationship between implicature and linguistic style Sperber and Wilson (1986:
217-218) state . . . a speaker not only aims to enlarge the mutual cognitive environment she shares
with the hearer; she also assumes a certain degree of mutuality, which is indicated, and sometimes
communicated, by her style. This seems quite true, but, again, raises the problem of how mutuality
is established and assumed, the very thing Sperber and Wilson want to avoid.
582 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge

(32) That girl is my daughter.

Because this description does not pick out one girl from the entire referent
array, we must rely on our coordinated knowledge and figure out the intended
referent. Clark, Schreuder and Buttrick (1983) found evidence that people were
able to do this quite well. In their studies, an experimenter approached students
on the Stanford University campus and handed them a photograph of President
Reagan standing next to his then director of the budget, David Stockman.
People in an independent survey had said that they assumed that Reagan was
well known to everyone but Stockman was not. Each student was asked either
(33a) or (33b).

(33a) You know who this man is, dont you?

(33b) Do you have any idea at all who this man is?

Note that the same definite description, this man, is used in both utterances.
Nonethelsss, in (33a) students replied with answers such as Yes, thats
Reagan, and never suggested that Stockman was the person being referred to.
On the other hand, when students were asked question (33b) they most often
responded with comments like Yes, I believe thats Stockman. For question
(33a) the experimenter presupposed that students ought to know who was
being referred to, but in (33b) he doubted that they would. It was these presup-
positions, and the community knowledge that Reagan is better known, that
enabled students to come to a unique referent in each case.
When listeners are addressed by someone, they usually assume the speaker
has done his/her best to enable them to understand him/her. Clark et al. (1983)
state this principle of optimal design as follows:

(34) The speaker designs his utterance in such a way that he has given reason
to believe that the addressee can readily and uniquely comprehend what is
meant on the basis of utterance along with the rest of their common
ground.

Undemtanding and answering questions, such as in (33a,b), depends on the

addressee assuming that s/he has been given enough information and can
thereby figure out the speakers meaning. In each case, the speaker intends the
addressee to base his/her inference not just on any knowledge or beliefs s/he
may have, but on their mutuaZ knowledge and beliefs (Clark et al. (1983)).
The results of Clark et al. indicate that understanding speakers questions
depends crucially on what shared knowledge is presupposed. These findings
provide some important evidence in support of the mutual knowledge hypo-
thesis. One of the difficulties with the relevance hypothesis is that it leaves
unexplained how conversations ever begin. Certainly, people strive to make
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 583

their first utterance relevant to the context, but exactly how is this done? What
determines the exact wording used in situations where the precise context has
yet to be established? Clark et al.s findings show that the surface form of a
question influences its interpretation. I have recently gathered some evidence
from my own laboratory demonstrating that people use mutual knowledge
information in formulating the precise surface forms of questions in conversa-
tion.4 The hypothesis tested was that speakers specify their utterances, even
from the beginning of conversation, to best fit what the listener knows and what
the listener knows about what the speaker knows, etc.
In this study subjects read short scenarios involving two or more characters.
The scenarios were systematically manipulated to depict different degrees of
mutual knowledge between two of the main characters. The subjects task was
to read each story and choose from a set of three alternatives the question that
best fits the context. Consider the following story:

Bob and Ann are eagerly waiting for a weekend visit from their friend, Ken, who is
supposed to arrive in time for dinner on Friday evening at a local restaurant. On Friday
morning, however, Ken phones Ann at work and tells her that he will not be arriving in
town until Saturday morning due to engine problems with his car. Ann phones Bob at
work and leaves a message with a co-worker, Sally, for Bob concerning Kens delay.
Later on Ann runs into Sally who says that she gave Bob the message. That evening
when Ann and Bob meet at home Ann says to him. . .

(a) Do you still want to go out to dinner with me tonight?

(b) Did you find out that Ken wont arrive until tomorrow?
(c) Shall we go out even though Ken wont arrive until tomorrow?

Which of these alternatives is the best choice? Note that in this situation Ann
and Bob both individually know that Ken will not be in town for dinner that
night. Moreover, they both know that the other person also knows this fact.
This can be stated more formally as S (speaker) knows p (proposition), A
(addressee) knows p, and both know that each other knows p. Consequently, it
is somewhat redundant to state information that is already mutually known to
both participants. Subjects, therefore, should choose alternative (a) as the best
utterance in this situation. The data supported this prediction as subjects picked
alternative (a) significantly more often than either of the other choices.
Suppose now that the above scenario is changed to reflect a different state of
mutual knowledge between the participants as in the following story.

Bob and Ann are eagerly waiting for a weekend visit from their friend, Ken, who is
supposed to arrive in time for dinner on Friday evening at a local restaurant. On Friday
morning, however, Ken phones Ann at work and tells her that he will not be arriving in

4 This work was done in collaboration with Rachel Mueller, Kevin Brailey, Robert Czx, and
Patrick Whitnell.
584 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge

town until Saturday morning due to engine problems with his car. Ann phones Bob at
work and leaves a message with a co-worker, Sally, for Bob concerning Kens arrival.
Later that evening Ann sees Bob and says to him . .

In this case the mutual knowledge between Ann and Bob can be character-
ized as S knows p, but S doesnt know if A knows p. After all, Bob might not
have received Anns message about Kens late arrival. Consequently, the utter-
ance Ann is most likely to use here should take this uncertainty into account,
which is best reflected in choice (b). Once again, the data supported this expec-
tation as subjects chose alternative (b) significantly more often that they did
either of the two other possibilities.
Consider now the last story context which describes another state of mutual
knowledge between the participants.

Bob and Ann are eagerly waiting for a weekend visit from their friend, Ken, who is
supposed to arrive in time for dinner on Friday evening at a local restaurant. On Friday
morning, however, Ken phones Ann at work and tells her that he will not be arriving in
town until Saturday morning due to engine problems with his car. Ann phones Bob at
work and says. . .

The mutual knowledge existing between Ann and Bob in this scenario is
viewed as S knows p, and S knows that A doesnt know p. Thus, Ann knows
for sure that Bob doesnt know that Ken is arriving on Saturday and must take
this into account when formulating her utterance to Bob. The best way of doing
this is to explicitly mention Kens difficulties, which is done in choice (c). Once
again, the results of my study showed that subjects chose the correct alternative
(c) significantly more often than either of the other two choices.
The evidence from this study indicates that people will design their questions
in light of the mutual knowledge which exists between themselves and their
listeners. These findings complement the Clark et al. (1983) work by showing
that production of language demands recognition of the shared beliefs and
knowledge between speakers and listeners. The results of both of these studies
provide additional support for the mutual knowledge hypothesis.

8. Concluding remarks

Sperber and Wilson have correctly recognized that pragmatics, the study of
utterance interpretation, is a branch of cognitive psychology. The main aim of
pragmatic theory is to produce an explicit account of how human beings inter-
pret utterances (Sperber and Wilson ( 198 1: 28 1)). The purpose of this article
has been to evaluate the competing claims of the mutual knowledge hypothesis
and the relevance hypothesis in light of the very goals Sperber and Wilson state
for a pragmatic theory of utterance interpretation.
 R. W. Gibbs, Jr. / Mutual knowledge 585

My arguments in favor of the mutual knowledge hypothesis and against the

relevance hypothesis are grounded in five interrelated observations. First, I have
suggested that Sperber and Wilsons proposal that mutual cognitive environ-
ments constitute the true context for comprehension is not sufficiently clear and
distinguishable from the concept of mutual knowledge. As such, the relevance
hypothesis seems to make use of the very idea that it attempts to replace.
Second, mutual knowledge is possible to determine in a finite period of time via
Clark and Marshalls (1981) mutual knowledge induction scheme without resort-
ing to an infinite set of beliefs statements usually viewed as a consequence of
establishing mutual knowledge. Third, it appears that mutual knowledge is
indeed a necessary prerequisite for the comprehension of many kinds of utter-
ances in conversation. This is particularly true if listeners are to distinguish
between inferences that are ostensively intended or authorized by speakers
from inferences that are unauthorized. Conversations are only cooperative to
the extent to which speakers specifically intend and listeners specifically recog-
nize m-intended messages. Part of my thesis here is that how listeners are able
to distinguish authorized versus unauthorized inferences must be part of a
cognitive theory of conversational inferences. Fourth, parts of the processing
model underlying the relevance hypothesis are not supported by contemporary
psycholinguistic research. Specifically, there is little empirical evidence in favor
of the idea that listeners must first decode an utterance into some propositional
representation before choosing a context in which that proposition is viewed
as most relevant. Finally, there is some recent psycholinguistic evidence
demonstrating that speakers formulate their utterances precisely to satisfy the
amount of knowledge they share with their listeners. This shared knowledge is
also directly utilized by listeners when interpreting utterances in everyday
discourse. These findings appear most congruent with the predictions of the
mutual knowledge hypothesis.
The observations and evidence presented in this article suggest that inferring
what speakers mean by their utterances can only be done if listeners have some
sort of mental model of the knowledge and beliefs they share with their inter-
locutors. Despite the fact that utterance interpretation is a complex natural
phenomena which can not always be experimentally studied, students of prag-
matics would be wise not to abandon an admittedly complex view of utterance
interpretation for approaches which do not capture what people really do when
they comprehend language.

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