Coordinating Minds. Clinical Pragmatics as a Laboratory of Human Cooperation

Clinical pragmatics is generally understood as the set of communicative competences that structure the therapeutic relationship. Such a definition, however, risks reducing its theoretical scope. If situated at the intersection of philosophy of language, cognitive science and evolutionary theory, clinical pragmatics can be reinterpreted as a privileged space for investigating the nature of human communicative action. This essay proposes to consider the clinical relationship not merely as an applied context, but as a highly sophisticated form of cooperative coordination, rooted in the evolutionary devices of social communication. Language, far from being reducible to a merely descriptive instrument, emerges as an inferential and regulative practice through which individuals negotiate intentions, align perspectives and modulate desire. From this perspective, the therapeutic alliance can be interpreted as a specific configuration of shared intentionality, in which clinician and patient co-construct frameworks of meaning that orient action. So-called “pragmatic failures” do not merely represent linguistic anomalies, but rather misalignments in the mechanisms of symbolic coordination that make human cooperation possible. Clinical practice is thus configured as a device of intersubjective realignment, capable of intervening in the deep dynamics that structure meaningful experience.