1 Chapter 1 Salient meanings, default meanings, and automatic processing Kasia M. Jaszczolt 1.1. Preliminaries As a result of the ongoing disputes concerning the boundary between semantic and pragmatic aspects of utterance meaning, the psychology of utterance processing has recently moved to the forefront of attention in post-Gricean pragmatics. The principal rationale for this trend is the following. When the outcome of pragmatic processing of an utterance came to be admitted as part of the truth-conditional content, or, in other words, when truth conditions came to be employed in the service of the meaning of utterances rather then sentences, a plethora of new research questions to do with the process of utterance interpretation has emerged. Contextualism, to call this orientation by its name (see Recanati 2005), must address the issues of, for example, how much context is allowed in the truth-conditional representation, how this contextual information gets there, and at what stages in utterance processing it gets there. Frequently asked questions include: Is there a difference between the processes which enrich the logical form of the sentence (constructing the explicit content, a.k.a. what is said) and those which produce implicatures understood as separate thoughts? Is there a difference in processing between inferring from context (viz. Grice’s particularized conversational implicatures) and inferring from general assumptions (viz. generalized conversational implicatures)? How should pragmatic inference be defined? Should it subsume automatic, associative ‘additions’ to encoded content or rather should the term mean only conscious processing by definition? Is pragmatic inference local (pre-propositional) or global (post-propositional)?