Article published in:
New Developments in Relevance Theory
Edited by Manuel Padilla Cruz and Agnieszka Piskorska
[Pragmatics & Cognition 28:2] 2021
► pp. 321–346

Relevance

Communication and cognition and…?

| University of Brighton

Deirdre Wilson (2018) provides a reflective overview of a volume devoted to the historic application of relevance-theoretic ideas to literary studies. She maintains a view argued elsewhere that the putative non-propositional nature of (among other things) literary effects are an illusion, a view which dates to Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995: 224): “If you look at [non-propositional] affective effects through the microscope of relevance theory, you see a wide array of minute cognitive [i.e., propositional] effects.” This paper suggests an alternative, that modern-day humans have two apparently different modes of expressing and interpreting information: one of these is a system in which propositional, cognitive effects dominate; the other involves direct, non-propositional effects. The paper concludes by describing two ways such affects might be assimilated into relevance theory. The first, to accept that humans are much more than merely cognitive organisms; the second, to rethink quite radically what we mean by cognition.

Keywords: affect, emotion, non-propositional effects, non-verbal communication, propositions, relevance theory, natural codes
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Towards a ‘something else’
    • 2.1Ineffability
    • 2.2Mental imagery
  • 3.Creature construction
  • 4.Affective effects
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 June 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.21013.wha
References
Anderson, Michael
2010 Neural reuse: A fundamental organizational principle of the brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 331: 245–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bambini, Valentina, Chiara Bertini, Walter Schaeken, Alessandra Stella and Francesco di Russo
2016 Disentangling metaphor from context: an ERP study. Frontiers in Psychology: Language Sciences. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baron-Cohen, Simon
1995 Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence
1999 Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (22): 577–660. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Grounded cognition: past, present and future. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (22): 577–660.Google Scholar
Bergquist, Patricia
1974 Phylum porifera. In Textbook of zoology invertebrates, 7th ed., ed. by Marshall, Andrew J. and Vale William Williams, 76–103. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd.Google Scholar
Bezuidenhout, Anne
2001 Metaphor and what is said: a defense of a direct expression view of metaphor, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 25 1: 156–186. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Black, Max
1955 Metaphor. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 55 (19): 273–294. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blakemore, Diane
1987 Semantic constraints on relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
2011 On the descriptive ineffability of expressive meaning. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(14): 3537–3550. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Block, Ned
1983 Mental pictures and cognitive science. The Philosophical Review 93, Vol. 4 1: 499–541. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bradbury, Jack & Sandra Vehrencamp
1998 Principles of animal communication. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.Google Scholar
Byrne, Richard & Andrew Whiten
eds. 1988 Machiavellian intelligence: Social expertise and the evolution of intellect in monkeys, apes and humans. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Camp, Elizabeth
2006 Metaphor and that certain ‘je ne sais quoi’. Philosophical Studies, 129 1: 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carston, Robyn
2002 Thoughts and utterances: The pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Linguistic communication and the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Synthese 165 (3):321-345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Metaphor: ad hoc concepts, literal meaning and mental images. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 1101: 295–321. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 Figurative language, mental imagery and pragmatics. Metaphor and Symbol: 198–217. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cave, Terence & Deirdre Wilson
2018 Reading beyond the code: literature and relevance theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheney, Dorothy & Robert Seyfarth
1990 How monkeys see the world: inside the mind of another species. Chicago: Chicago University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Andy
1999 An embodied cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3 (9): 345–351. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collingwood, Robin George
1938 The principles of art. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cornell, Louis & Tim Wharton
2021 Before meaning: creature construction, sea-sponges, lizards and Humean projection. In Elly Ifantidou, Louis de Saussure & Tim Wharton (eds.) Beyond meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 177–198. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Damasio, Antonio
1994 Descartes Error. Harper Perennial.Google Scholar
Davidson, Donald
1978 What metaphors mean. Critical Inquiry 5 (1): 31–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dennett, Daniel
1978 Beliefs about beliefs. Behavior and Brain Sciences 4 1: 568–570. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1981 Brainstorms: philosophical aims on mind and psychology. MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deplanque, Sylvie & David Sander
2021 A fascinating but risky case of reverse inference: From measures to emotions! Food Quality and Preferences. Volume 921. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellsworth, Phoebe
2013 Appraisal theory: old and new questions. Emotion Review: 125–131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fabb, Nigel
2021 Experiences of ineffable significance. In Elly Ifantidou, Louis de Saussure & Wharton (eds.) Beyond meaning, 135–150. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner
2002 The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities, New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Fridland, E. R.
2015 Skill, non-propositional thought, and the cognitive penetrability of perception. Journal for General Philosophy of Science 461: 105–120. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Genovesi, Chris
2020 Metaphor and what is meant: Metaphorical content, what is said, and contextualism. Journal of Pragmatics 1571: 17–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, Ray
1994 The poetics of mind: figurative thought, language and understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2002 A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and implicated. Journal of Pragmatics. 341: 457–486. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Glucksberg, Sam
2008 How metaphors create categories – quickly. Gibbs, Raymond (ed.) The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 67–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Golding, Alexandra
2016 Metaphor in the embodied mind: beyond the propositionality of figurative language. PhD thesis. University of Brighton.
Goleman, Daniel
1995 Emotional intelligence, New York, Bantam Books Inc.Google Scholar
Grice, H. Paul
1957 Meaning. Philosophical Review 661: 377–388. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1975a Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. and J. Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press: 41–58.Google Scholar
1975b Method in philosophical psychology (from the Banal to the Bizarre). Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 481: 23–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1982 Meaning revisited. In Smith, Neil (ed.) Mutual knowledge. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
1989 Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gutt, Ernest-August
2013 How does the affective relate to ostensive-inferential communication? Unpublished ms.Google Scholar
Hatfield, Elaine, John Cacioppo & Richard Rapson
1994 Emotional contagion. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hauser, Marc
1996 The evolution of communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Humphrey, Nicholas
1984 Consciousness regained. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Huron, David
2006 Sweet anticipation: Music and the psychology of expectation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kaplan, David
1999 What is meaning? Explorations in the theory of meaning as use. Ms.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson
2003 Metaphors we live by. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leslie, Alan
1994 ToMM, ToBY and Agency: core architecture and domain-specificity. In Hirschfeld, Lawrence & Susan Gelman. eds. Mapping the mind: domain specificity in cognition and culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 119–148. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lieberman, Mark
2000 Intuition: A social-cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological Bulletin 1261: 109–137. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lepore, Ernie & Matthew Stone
2010 Against Metaphorical Meaning. Topoi 29 (2): 165–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kolaiti, Patricia
2019 The limits of expression: language, literature, mind. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
in press a. From a poetics of language to a poetics of action: literature and art as a cognitive object. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
in press b. Perceptual relevance and art: some tentative suggestions. Journal of Literary Semantics 49: 2. DOI logo
Longhitano, Sabina
2014 Communicating the ineffable: A pragmatic account of literariness. Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences. Vol. 1581: 187–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martinich, Aloysius
1984 A theory for metaphor. Journal of Literary Semantics 13(1): 35–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McGinn, Colin
2004 Mindsight. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Michaels, Anne
1991 Miner’s Pond: poems. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.Google Scholar
1992 Unseen formations. Open Letter 8.41: 96–99.Google Scholar
Moeschler, Jacques
2009 Pragmatics, propositional and non-propositional effects: Can a theory of utterance interpretation account for emotions in verbal communication? Social Science Information 48(3): 447–464. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moors, Agnes, Phoebe Ellsworth, Klaus Scherer & Nico Frijda
2013 Appraisal theories of emotion: state of the art and future development. Emotion Review, 51: 119–124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Neale, Stephen
1992 Paul Grice and the philosophy of language. Linguistics and Philosophy 15.51: 509–559. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ortony, Andrew
1975 Why metaphors are necessary and not just nice. Educational Theory 251: 45–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Padilla Cruz, Manuel
2009a Towards an alternative relevance-theoretic approach to interjections. International Review of Pragmatics 1 (1): 182–206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009b Might interjections encode concepts? More questions than answers. Łodź Papers in Pragmatics 5 (2): 241–270.Google Scholar
Pignocchi, Alessandro
2012 History and intentions in the experience of artworks. Topoi 331: 477–486. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pilkington, Adrian
2000 Poetic effects: a relevance theory perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Piskorska, Agnieszka
2012 Cognition and emotions–a joint effort at obtaining positive cognitive effects? In Relevance studies in Poland, Vol. 4. Essays on language and communication. Warsaw: Warsaw University Press: 102–111.Google Scholar
2016 Perlocutionary effects and relevance theory. In Padilla Cruz, Manuel (ed.), Relevance Theory: Recent Developments, Current Challenges and Future Directions, 287–305. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamin. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Potts, Christopher
2005 The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
2007a The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33 ( 2 ): 165–197. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007b The centrality of expressive indices. Theoretical Linguistics 33 (2): 255–268. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Proust, Marcel
1922–1931 À la recherche du temps erdu. In search of lost time, translated by Scott-Moncrieff, Charles Kenneth, Terence Kilmartin & Andreas Mayor (Vol. 71). Revised by D. J. Enright. London: Chatto and Windus, New York: The Modern Library 1992 Based on the French La Pléiade edition (1987–89).Google Scholar
Pylyshyn, Zenon
1973 What the mind’s eye tells the mind’s brain: A critique of mental imagery. Psychological Bulletin, 80 ( 1 ): 1–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ramachandran, Vilayanur, & William Hirstein
1999 The science of art: A neurological theory of aesthetic experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies 61: 15–51.Google Scholar
Recanati, François
1993 Direct reference: From language to thought. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rey, Georges
1981 Introduction: What are mental images? In Block, Ned (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology: 117–127. Harvard: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
1980 Functionalism and the emotions. In Rorty, Amélie (ed.) Explaining emotions, 163–198. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sander, David, Jordan Grafman & Tiziana Zalla
2003 The human amygdala: an evolved system for relevance detection. Reviews in the Neurosciences, 14 (4): 303–16. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Saussure, Louis & Peter Schulz
2009 Subjectivity out of irony. Semiotica (173): 397–416. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Saussure, Louis & Wharton
2020 Relevance, effect and affect. International Review of Pragmatics, John Benjamin: DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schooler, Jonathan & Joseph Melcher, J.
1994 The ineffability of insight. In Smith, Steven, Thomas Ward, & Ronald Finke (Eds.), The creative cognition approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 97–133.Google Scholar
Searle, John
1979 Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan
1996 Explaining culture: a naturalistic approach. Blackwell: Oxford.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan, Fabrice Clément, Christophe Heintz, Oliver Mascaro, Hugo Mercier, Gloria Origgi & Deirdre Wilson
2010 Epistemic vigilance. Mind and Language 251: 359–393. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson
1986/1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1st and 2nd eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
2015 Beyond speaker’s meaning. Croatian Journal of Philosophy XV (44): 117–149.Google Scholar
1998 The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon. In Carruthers, Peter & Jill Boucher. (eds.), Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, 184–200. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 A deflationary account of metaphors. In Gibbs, Ray. (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, p. 84–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stanley, Jason
2011 Know how. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tendahl, Markus & Raymond Gibbs
2008 Complementary perspectives on metaphor: cognitive linguistics and relevance theory. Journal of Pragmatics 401: 1823–1864. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Coupling of metaphoric cognition and communication: a reply to Deirdre Wilson. Intercultural Pragmatics 8–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo
1897 What is art? (translated by Pevear, Richard & Larissa Volokhonsky 1995) Hanworth: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Tomasello, Michael, Melinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne & Henrike Moll
2005 Understanding and sharing intentions: the origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 281: 675 – 691. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tooby, John & Leda Cosmides
2008 The evolutionary psychology of the emotions and their relationship to internal regulatory variables. In Handbook of Emotions, 3rd ed., ed. by Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett: 114–137. New York: Guilford.Google Scholar
Tye, Michael
2004 On the non-conceptual content of experience. In Reicher, Marie & Johan Marek (eds.), Experience and Analysis: Papers of the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 221–239. Vienna: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society.Google Scholar
Wharton, Tim
2003a Interjections, language and the ‘showing’/‘saying’ continuum. Pragmatics & Cognition. Vol. 11–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003b Natural pragmatics and natural codes. Mind and Language Volume 18, No. 5: 447–477. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 Pragmatics and non-verbal communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 That bloody so-and-so has retired: Expressives revisited. Lingua. 175–176: 20–35.Google Scholar
Wharton, Tim & Claudia Strey
2019 Slave to the passions: making emotions relevant. In Relevance, pragmatics and interpretation, ed. by Robyn Carston, Billy Clark, and Kate Scott, 253–267. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wharton, Tim, Constant Bonard, Daniel Dukes, David Sander & Steve Oswald
2021 Relevance and emotion. Journal of Pragmatics, 1811: 259–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre
2011 Parallels and differences in the treatment of metaphor in relevance theory and cognitive linguistics. Intercultural Studies. 8–21: 177–196.Google Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre & Robyn Carston
2019 Pragmatics and the challenge of non-propositional effects. Journal of Pragmatics 1451: 31–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre
2018 Relevance theory and literary interpretation. In Cave, T. & Wilson, D. (eds.) Reading Beyond the Code: Literature and Relevance Theory, 185–204. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Yus, Francisco (Paco)
2016 Propositional attitude, affective attitude and irony comprehension. Pragmatics & Cognition 23(1): 92–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Strassheim, Jan
2022. Relevance as the Moving Ground of Semiosis. Philosophies 7:5 ► pp. 115 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 january 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.