Sperber: Relevance: Communication & Cognition (cloth) (Language and Thought) - Hardcover

Sperber, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674754751 ISBN 13: 9780674754751

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1992

Synopsis

Relevance, first published in 1986, was named as one of themost important and influential books of the decade in the TimesHigher Educational Supplement. This revised edition includes anew Preface outlining developments in Relevance Theory since 1986,discussing the more serious criticisms of the theory, andenvisaging possible revisions or extensions.

The book sets out to lay the foundation for a unified theory ofcognitive science. The authors argue than human cognition has agoal: we pay attention only to information which seems to usrelevant. To communicate is to claim someone′s attention, and henceto imply that the information communicated is relevant. Thus, asingle property – relevance is seen as the key to humancommunication and cognition.

A second important feature of the book is its approach to thestudy of reasoning. It elucidates the role of background orcontextual information in spontaneous inference, and shows thatnon–demonstrative inference processes can be fruitfully analysed asa form of suitably constrained guesswork. It directly challengesrecent claims that human central thought processes are likely toremain a mystery for some time to come.

Thirdly, the authors offer new insight into language andliterature, radically revising current view on the nature and goalsof verbal comprehension, and in particular on metaphor, irony,style, speech acts, presupposition and implicature.

About this title

Review

This book is very likely to become a classic, notonly because of its potential implications for linguistics,cognitive psychology and anthropology, but because of the range andoriginality of the theory it proposes. PascalEngel, Revue Philosophique

Cognitive science is very often marred by demarcationdisputes and protectionist attitudes which have little or norational basis. Occasionally, however, it works as it should and abook appears which reaches across the bread and butter lines whichinstitutional life forces upon us. Relevance is, I think, such abook. Alan Leslie, Mind and Language.

The repercussions of Relevance are likely in thelong run to be great felt first, perhaps, in the pragmaticsof conversation, the philosophy of language, and reader–responsecriticism, but also in many other activities: construction ofmemory models, pedagogy, machine learning and (doubtless)advertising and propaganda. Alastair Fowler,London Review of Books

I recommend this book to people interested inlinguistics, philosophy of language and pragmatics, and,definitely, to people who cultivate an interest insemiotics. Umberto Eco,L Expresso

This is probably the best book you ll ever read oncommunication. Rhetoric Society Quarterly

About the Author

Dan Sperber of the Centre National de la RechercheScientifique in Paris, and the Université de Paris X, isauthor of Rethinking Symbolism and On AnthropologicalKnowledge.

Dierdre Wilson is Reader in Linguistics at UniversityCollege London, and the author of Presuppositions andNon–Truth–Conditional Semantics and Modern Linguistics: TheResults of Chomsky′s Revolution.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0674754751
• ISBN 13: 9780674754751
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288