Abstract
Relevance theory is a framework for the study of cognition, proposed primarily in order to provide a psychologically realistic account of communication. This paper (1) presents relevance theory’s central commitments in detail and explains the theoretical motivations behind them; and (2) shows some of the ways in which these core principles are brought to bear on empirical problems. The core of relevance theory can be divided into two sets of assumptions. Assumptions relating to cognition in general include the definition of relevance as a trade-off between effort and effects, and the claim that cognition tends to maximise relevance. Assumptions about communication include the claims that understanding an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker’s communicative and informative intentions; and that the communicative principle of relevance and the presumption of optimal relevance mandate the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure, a heuristic that guides the search for the intended interpretation of utterances. Relevance theorists model communication in terms of the working of this comprehension procedure. There are, in addition, several strategies that guide the explanation of phenomena in relevance theory, including: (1) a stronger form of Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor, (2) the possibility of dividing what is linguistically encoded between conceptual and procedural information; (3) the interpretive/descriptive distinction; (4) the use of ad hoc concepts.
This paper has benefitted greatly from comments and suggestions from Deirdre Wilson and from Carsten Hansen. My thanks to both of them. Remaining mistakes and inclarities are my responsibility. This paper was written at CSMN, University of Oslo, with funding from CSMN and the Research Council of Norway (FRIHUM).
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Notes
- 1.
The references given here are far from exhaustive. For many more references, sorted by author and by subject matter, see Francisco Yus’ online relevance theory bibliography at http://www.ua.es/personal/francisco.yus/rt.html.
- 2.
See Sperber and Wilson’s replies to comments on their precis of ‘Relevance’ in Behavioral and Brain Science (Sperber and Wilson 1987), and Wedgewood (2007) and Kjøll (2010) who have argued that certain recent criticisms of relevance theory in the philosophy of language literature are based on fundamental misunderstandings about relevance theory’s commitments.
- 3.
- 4.
Lakatos also claims that the core commitments are to be kept, while auxiliary hypotheses should be modified or disposed of in response to empirical challenges. (He calls this the ‘negative heuristic’: Lakatos 1968, p. 169.) I return to this point briefly in the conclusion of this paper, where I discuss some changes that have occurred in the core of relevance theory.
- 5.
The ‘environment’ of each cognitive system is still richer, since it includes outputs from other cognitive systems. For example, our general reasoning is fed by memory, not just by our perceptions of the external environment.
- 6.
- 7.
Optimal foraging theory is also in this intellectual territory, since it can be seen as an application of rational decision theory.
- 8.
Cognitive effects are sometimes called contextual effects, particularly in Sperber and Wilson 1986b.
- 9.
This is a change from the definition of cognitive effects in Sperber and Wilson 1986b. This is a considerable change in principle, but it may not imply much difference in processing: Sperber (2005, p. 65) suggests that in practice “the brain would be roughly right in treating any and every cognitive effect as a positive effect, in other words, as a cognitive benefit.”
- 10.
One might wonder why the lowering of credence in an assumption only counts as a cognitive effect if it lowers it to zero i.e. eliminates it as an assumption. Briefly, it is because Sperber and Wilson assume that “[mere] weakening is always a by-product of a more basic contextual effect” (Sperber and Wilson 1986b, pp. 294, fn d), for example the elimination of another assumption which provided support for the one that is weakened—and so mere weakening does not need to be counted separately.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
But not necessary, according to Sperber and Wilson. They suggest that unintentional ostensive communication is possible in cases where an utterer has the informative intention but not the communicative intention (as in the photograph example) but acts so ineptly that the intended audience infers that the informative intention is present (1986b, pp. 63–64).
- 14.
Grice’s definition of speaker meaning includes a third intention, expressly to rule out from counting as meaning such cases as openly showing a photograph as evidence of an affair, showing a plaster cast as evidence of a broken leg, or showing a severed head as evidence that the person whose head it was, is dead. While it might be that these are not happily called cases of meaning (which as discussed, was Grice’s concern), there is no doubt that they are cases of communication, in the deliberate, open sense that we have been discussing, so this third intention is not needed in relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986b, pp. 53–54).
- 15.
- 16.
Sperber and Wilson give semiotics as an example of a field that has failed to progress partly because its fundamental assumptions do not pick out a natural class: there are no interesting generalisations, they say, to be obtained over the totality of languages, fashion, novels, road signs etc. seen as coded signals (Sperber and Wilson 1986b, p. 6ff).
- 17.
What the producer of an utterance intends to communicate is constrained (like other intentions) by what she can rationally hope to achieve. For example, I could not normally expect an addressee to work out that I intend to talk about cats using the word ‘dog’, nor that I intend to refer to my cat by pointing at a passing dog, so I cannot normally intend these interpretations (Grice 1971; Sperber and Wilson 1986b, p. 169; Neale 1992, p. 551).
- 18.
Some but not all gestures encode meanings. For example, thumbs-up encodes something like ‘Good!’ (or, for divers, ‘Let’s surface’).
- 19.
It does not follow that in interpreting an utterance all the decoding is done first, followed by the pragmatic inference. As is well known from psycholinguistics, processing of utterances proceeds ‘online’, that is, in real time, as the words are heard or read.
- 20.
This is also a Gricean observation. Grice lists indeterminacy as a property of implicatures, a conequence of the fact that they must be inferred non-demonstratively (Grice 1975, p. 58).
- 21.
I use ‘Σ’ (for ‘sum’) because in general an interpretation is a bundle of propositions. See Sects. 3.4 and 3.5 below.
- 22.
Example suggested by Deirdre Wilson (p.c.). See also Sperber and Wilson (1986b, pp. 39, 79–80).
- 23.
Relevance theory also distinguishes between i) the strength with which an utterance implicates an assumption, and ii) the strength with which an assumption is implied (Sperber and Wilson 2008, §7), but there is no space in the current paper to discuss this distinction.
- 24.
The notions of contextual assumption and contextual implication were introduced in Sect. 2.5 above.
- 25.
- 26.
The point of calling the maxims ‘maxims’ is to suggest that, like Kant’s maxims, they motivate agents’ actions.
- 27.
See Sperber 1994b, who suggests that the ability to make these adjustments develops in early childhood.
- 28.
As Sperber and Wilson point out (1986b, p. 185), this may be part of the reason why much psycholinguistic work (e.g. on disambiguation) has tended to focus only on accessibility (i.e. effort) factors.
- 29.
- 30.
This is not meant to rule out puns, double lecture and the like. In such cases, Wilson and Sperber say, “it is the fact that the speaker has produced such an utterance that is seen as a communicative act. It receives a higher-order interpretation, which may involve endorsing both lower-order interpretations (if they are compatible), or rejecting both (if they are not).” (2002, pp. 605, fn 6).
- 31.
- 32.
It is tempting to say that in addition to the core, there is both a mantle and a crust. Then ad hoc concepts, the conceptual/procedural distinction and the distinction between interpretive and descriptive use are in the mantle, while the relevance theoretic accounts of pronouns, utterance modifiers, irony, non-declaratives, loose use, hyperbole and metaphor are parts of the crust.
- 33.
It is from the point of view of interpretation that this mental representation of what is conveyed by the utterance is after pragmatic processing: i.e. the hearer only gets to it once pragmatic processing has been performed.
- 34.
One might be able to argue that there is only one LF for the sentence if one postulates (as Cohen does) a very complicated lexical entry for ‘and’, but this shifts the complexity without reducing it and also creates new problems (Carston 1993, p. 35).
- 35.
Namely (1) real and (2) apparent violation of maxims, (3) clashes between maxims and even (4) in cases in which there is no violation and no appearance of it.
- 36.
Much of what would be explained in terms of presuppositions by other theorists is naturally understood in relevance theory as (and unified with) the communication of implicated premises. Some other alleged presuppositions are treated as entailments: e.g. relevance theorists tend to endorse the Russellian/Gricean account of definite descriptions (Carston 2002, pp. 110, 306–11). The roots of relevance theory’s view of presuppositions are in Wilson’s early work (Wilson 1975a, b). See also Kempson 1975.
- 37.
This account of pronouns, as Sperber and Wilson point out, is something like a cognitive version of Kaplan’s character/content distinction.
- 38.
Interpretive use also includes the use of sentences to “represent an assumption, without attributing this assumption to anyone” (Sperber and Wilson 1986b, p. 229).
- 39.
On the other hand, the classical account of irony is incompatible with the communicative principle. A speaker cannot generally communicate just the opposite of what her words mean because it would cause the hearer gratuitous effort, given that she could just have said what she meant.
- 40.
- 41.
All utterances are interpretive in this way, since an utterance is meant to represent a thought of the speaker’s. What relevance theory usually calls interpretive use is use in which that thought is itself interpretive: i.e. resembles another thought, or an utterance, rather than a proposition which describes a state of affairs (Sperber and Wilson 1986b, p. 231.).
- 42.
- 43.
Lakatos is sometimes interpreted as saying that the core of a research programme should never change (e.g. Godfrey-Smith, 2003, p. 105). However, his ‘negative heuristic’ (see note 5 above) merely forbids changing the core in response to empirical problems. It is compatible with this that there be changes to the core not motivated by a direct clash with empirical evidence. Indeed, if changes to the core turn out to be mainly motivated by other considerations that would provide some corroboration for (a version of) his views.
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Allott, N. (2013). Relevance Theory. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_3
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eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)