Page 467 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Grice's 'maxim of relation' (viz: 'be relevant') has been elevated to the status of an overriding principle governing communication and cognition by Sperber and Wilson (1986,1995). The principle of relevance is at the center of their claim of a new approach to the study of human communication. 'Relevance theory' (RT) purports to be a unified theory of cognition to serve as a foundation for studies in cognitive science. Relevance theory offers insights into, among other things, inferencing, implicature, irony, and metaphor. Its refinements in the study of implicature are pre- sented briefly in Sect. 5 below. The aims of RT are ambitious, but it does have some defects which limit its usefulness. The theory relies heavily on the expli- cation of the workings of a formal deductive system for its substance, rests on restricted, asocial con- ceptions of communication, language-users, and their cognitive environments, and ignores developments in both discourse analysis and artificial intelligence.
1. The Principle of Relevance
Sperber and Wilson formulate the 'principle of rel- evance' as follows:
Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance.
(1986:158)
(See Sect. 2 below for an explanation of the term 'ostensive.') The term 'relevance' is used in a technical sense to refer to the bringing about of contextual effect. An utterance is only relevant if it has some contextual effect. In Sperber and Wilson's words:
The notion of a contextual effect is essential to a charac- terization of relevance. We want to argue that having contextual effects is a necessary condition for relevance, and that other things being equal, the greater the con- textual effects, the greater the relevance.
(1986:119)
There are varying degrees of relevance. Sperber and Wilson claim that there is an inverse correlation of effort and relevance. In other words, the more pro- cessing it takes to work out what a speaker intends by an utterance, the less relevant that utterance is. As various critics have pointed out, this begs the ques- tions: 'relevant to what?' (e.g., Clark 1987) and 'rel- evant to whom?' (Wilks 1987).
2. Ostensive-inferential Communication
Ostensive and inferential communication are two sides of the same process; a process which, Sperber and Wilson argue, is achieved because of the principle of
relevance. A communicator is involved in ostension; a communicator's audience is involved in inferencing. A communicator's ostensive action comes with a 'guarantee of relevance' (1986:50), such that what makes the intention behind the ostensive act manifest to an audience is the principle of relevance.
3. Informative and Communicative Intentions
A distinction in RT, upon which Sperber and Wilson place considerable importance, is between 'informa- tive' and 'communicative' intentions, which underlie all communication. In the informative intention, a speaker (S) intends a hearer (H) to recognize S's inten- tion to inform H of something: S intends to make manifest to an audience a set of assumptions (on 'manifestness' and 'assumptions,' see Sect. 4 below).
In the communicative intention, S intends H to recognize the informative intention; it is therefore a second-order informativeintention.
4. Cognitive Environments, Assumptions, and Mani- festness
Sperber and Wilson initially define assumptions as 'thoughts treated by the individual as representations of the actual world' (1986:2). They give precedence to the cognitive function of language in RT. But a strength of it is its ability to include nonpropositional and expressive elements, to account for vague, ambivalent meanings or 'impressions,' which may not be verbally communicated. The authors account for explicitness of an informative intention in terms of the degree to which an assumption is made manifest. Before going into detail about degrees of manifestness, however, a fuller description of assumptions is needed.
Assumptions are composed of a structured set of concepts. A concept is located in the memory store and contains an address (its point of access in mem- ory) and one or all of the following entries: encyc- lopedic, logical, and lexical (Sperber and Wilson
1986:83). The human information-processor (see Sect. 5.3 below) manipulates the conceptual content of assumptions. The processing device has access to assumptions from four sources: (1) direct perception; (2) decoding of the encoded utterances of others; (3) its own memory store, and (4) deduction from assumptions accessible from sources 1 to 3. Together these assumptions from four sources make up an indi- vidual's cognitive environment.
In Sperber and Wilson's model, H can infer S's assumptions on the basis of knowledge of S's cognitive
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