 Defaults in OT pragmatics combine the precision of a formal account with the psychological reality of Gricean intention-based explanations. The main difference is that they don’t seem to be defeasible: OT pragmatics tells us how an actual interpretation arose, rather than what the default interpretation could be. Constraints are ranked, so to speak, post hoc: they explain what actually happened and why, rather than what should happen according to the rules of rational communicative behaviour. In other words, context is incorporated even sooner into the process of utterance interpretation than in Gricean accounts and allows for non-defeasible, albeit standard, default, interpretations. With respect to this feature they resemble defaults of Default Semantics discussed in Section 1.8.