Page 469 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

guesses at) S's cognitive environment. (For further discussion, see Mey and Talbot 1988.)
6.2 Assumptions and Manifestness
A cognitive environment is the total of an individual's manifest knowledge, a whole set of assumptions deriv- able from the four sources mentioned in Sect. 4 above. Within the framework given, there is no way of dis- cussing any divergence of assumptions according to class, gender, or ethnicity. In the absence of any cul- tural perspective, the knowledge manifest to different individuals is largely the same (typical examples include knowledge of the weather, the pleasantness of sea air, and the price of cars). The effect is highly ethnocentric; one is left with the impression that every- one lives in the same kind of white, middle-class, edu- cated world. While this may be true, to some extent, of the linguists and cognitive scientists comprising the authors' audience, it is a seriously inadequate pro- vision of social context for a study of either com- munication or cognition. This ethnocentric bias is displayed particularly clearly by the authors' examples of derivable assumptions that are weakly manifest (e.g., 'Chomsky never had breakfast with Julius Cae- sar') (1986:40). Their ad hoc choice of unrelated facts known both to themselves and their readers for the potentially endless production of negative assump- tions betrays an unsystematic approach.
As an alternative to the concept of mutual knowl- edge which they consider to be problematic (and which indeed has its own problems), Sperber and Wil- son put forward the concept of 'mutual manifestness' of assumptions. They dislike mutual knowledge because, as they see it, such a concept relies on positing consciously held knowledge which S and H both, by definition, know for certain that they share. As they say, this degree of certainty is an impossibility, ren- dering the concept useless:
Mutual knowledge must be certain, or else it does not exist; and since it can never be certain it can never exist. (1986:19-20)
In order to provide a viable alternative to this excess- ively rigid and unsatisfactory concept of mutual knowledge, Sperber and Wilson suggest instead the 'mutual manifestness' of knowledge. Similarities in individuals' cognitive environments make mutually manifest assumptions possible. However, mutually manifest knowledge is itself a problem; it has little more to offer than the concept of mutual knowledge that it is intended to replace. As knowledge-which- is-there-to-be-mutually-assumed it is in principle no different from mutual knowledge (see Gibbs 1987a, 1987b for discussion). In the absence of any social element, with which to locate and specify kinds of knowledge that might be mutually accessible to different individuals, this is inevitable.
6.3 The Mind as Information Processor
In RT,thought processes are assumed to be exclusively matters of information processing by a 'device.' The human mind is conceived to be a 'deductive mech- anism' which has the capacity to manipulate the con- ceptual content of assumptions from a range of sources (see Sect. 4 above) and no more than this. Sperber and Wilson operate with the same kind of reductionist conception of human mental processes as is found in transformational generative grammar, namely the 'black box.' This view of the mind severely limits the scope of human mental activity and pre- cludes any sociocultural perspective on the indi- vidual's construction of knowledge. Sperber and Wilson's favorite metaphor for the human mind is the computer. They limit their object of enquiry accord- ingly to how the human mind functions as a computer, i.e., to human information processing.
7. Conclusion
Sperber and Wilson's basic premise is that 'Human cognition is relevance oriented' (1987:700). Their aim in creating RT was to provide a unified theory of cog- nition for studies in cognitive science. Such a unified approach was eagerly awaited and anticipated as a major breakthrough. When Relevance appeared in print in 1986 it was favorably received in many places and has made some contribution to developments in pragmatics (in particular, in the identification of implicatures; see Sect. 5 above). It generated a good deal of debate in the late 1980s. A new version with some revision and extension appeared in 1995. However, RT does not appear to have had much last- ing influence or effect; nor has it proved to supply the unified theory that was anticipated.
See also: Conversational Maxims; Shared Knowledge.
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