| Abstract (about 50 words): | Debates between people who argue from positions of disbelief and those who profess from positions of belief reveal that the fallacious definition and the erroneous use of the terms ‘atheism’ and ’atheist’ can lead to gross misunderstandings generated at the semantics-pragmatics interface whenever these words feature in utterances that infringe the constraints meant to foster meaningful acts of communication. The aim of this paper is to dismantle the mechanics of miscommunication in such cases, by resorting to etymology, possible worlds semantics, the analysis of factive versus non-factive predication and the Gricean conversational maxims. |