PRAGMATIC INFERENCE

Decode what a speaker means when words and intent diverge.

Sarcasm requires the simultaneous execution of four cognitive operations: parsing the literal meaning, detecting the contextual mismatch, modeling the speaker's actual belief state, and inverting the surface meaning to arrive at intent. Most humans do this in under a second, without awareness of the computation.

The medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction — the core nodes of the Theory of Mind network — are consistently activated during sarcasm comprehension beyond what literal language requires. Research from MIT's Language and Brain Lab established that pragmatic language ability fractures into three dissociable components. Sarcasm and implicature fall in the first: social convention understanding.

Large language models process the words. They do not model the speaker. Understanding what someone means — not what they said — requires tracking belief states that no text encoder represents. That gap is what this axis measures.

Your PRAGMATIC INFERENCE is unmeasured.