‘Positive Hermeneutics’: Relevance and Communication

Abstract

Although they concentrate on spoken communication, Sperber and Wilson assert that relevance theory also applies to the writing and reading of literature. They write, ‘we assume, for instance, that the lengthy and highly self-conscious processes of textual interpretation that religious or literary scholars engage in are governed just as much by the principle of relevance as is spontaneous utterance comprehension’ (Relevance, p. 75). It is evident, however, from their rejection of the code model and their treatment of weak implicatures, that they do not (or rather, could not) hold a naive view of the perfect transmission of a univocal authorial message.¹ As they put it at the beginning of Relevance