Cognitive Pragmatics

Marco Mazzone

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501507670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Cognitive pragmatics is a mature field of research, characterized by robust theories and a growing amount of experimental work. In particular, Relevance Theory has provided a rich framework for research in the field. However, this theory makes a number of assumptions that are rooted in a modular view of cognition. This book provides a detailed analysis of such assumptions, arguing for an alternative model which has, however, some support in ideas explored by relevance theorists. First of all, inferences are explained in terms of associative pattern completion within associative networks, based on the schematic organization of memory. This explanation is shown to apply to a number of cognitive domains besides pragmatics, including mindreading. Moreover, such a view is compatible with a general understanding of the neurocomputational machinery of our cortex, suggesting a general argument to the effect that modularity in its standard version cannot be right. Second, the book argues for a crucial role of conscious attention in pragmatics as well as in most cognitive processes. In the end, what is proposed is not only a revision of Relevance Theory but also a fresh analysis of reasoning, which vindicates some Gricean intuitions.

1Relevance

1.1Introduction

Central to the theoretical framework proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) is a specific notion of relevance, which the scholars define explicitly and carefully distinguish from the ordinary meaning of the term. The basic idea is that the relevance of a stimulus is its capacity to modify the information represented within a cognitive system, and a relevant interpretation is one that processes the stimulus so as to maximise its cognitive effects. The process of utterance understanding is said to be just a special case of the general tendency of cognitive systems to interpret stimuli so as to maximise their impact. Comprehension would thus be driven by search for relevance.

The main thesis I am going to defend is that, to the precise extent that it departs from the ordinary meaning of the term, the notion of relevance put forth by Sperber and Wilson is not able to accomplish the theoretical function assigned to it, that is, the function to guide the comprehension process. I will argue in fact that the mechanisms described by RT for the construction and evaluation of relevant – i.e., maximally informative – interpretations are unsatisfactory. According to RT, utterances cause expectations of relevance in addressees, and interpretations that have enough cognitive effects to meet those expectations are accepted.1 One would then need an explanation both of how the cognitive system forms specific quantitative expectations of relevance, whose satisfaction by a sufficient amount of cognitive effects is needed to accept a given interpretation, and of how the cognitive effects would be measured and compared with those expectations. However, in order to answer the second question – how cognitive effects are measured? – relevance theorists provide a speculation with no independent theoretical or empirical support, while no explanation at all is provided regarding how addressees form quantitative expectations of relevance, to which the amount of actual cognitive effects should be compared.

Interestingly, however, RT explores a quite different strategy that is not based on the notion of relevance as maximisation of cognitive effects, thus making it possible to avoid both the above difficulties. On the one hand, RT suggests that a mechanism for measuring cognitive effects might not be needed, since the construction of relevant interpretations is already guaranteed by a mechanism that is far more established in cognitive science, that is, competitive access based on the organization of memory. On the other hand, with an even more radical theoretical turn, RT has recently proposed that expectations of relevance are not related to the amount of cognitive effects but to their type instead. As I will show, these suggestions pave the way for a more traditional view, according to which relevance is not defined with regard to informational states, but rather to the plurality of the speakers’ goals. This in turn will have important consequences for the issue of the relationship between cognitive pragmatics and mindreading.

1.2Some assumptions

It is important to make explicit from the beginning some basic assumptions that will guide my analysis of the notion of relevance in RT.

In the first place, I do not subscribe to some radical form of epistemological holism, that is, to the idea that theories face the tribunal of experience as inseparable wholes. On the contrary, I assume that theories may have more or less cohesive and logically consistent parts, and that as a general rule those parts can be assessed separately. Specifically, with regard to RT, there are a number of claims that I find entirely convincing, but I assume that these claims can be separated from the explicit definition of relevance provided by Sperber and Wilson, which in my opinion raises instead serious theoretical problems. At the same time, I will show that in the writings of relevance theorists there are clues to a different notion of relevance, which is closer to the ordinary meaning and free from the above problems.

To put it a bit differently, what I aim to do is – so to speak – the pruning of a luxuriant theory. Even as far as the notion of relevance is concerned, we can find formulations (or at least suggestions) that are immune to my criticisms; and this also occurs with respect to other issues I will discuss. As a consequence, my criticisms may occasionally seem ungenerous and not entirely justified. I am well aware of this, and I know that RT can be held to support (also) different views than the ones I criticize. However, there are important pieces of their theory that are repeated on many occasions and that I find problematic, both in themselves and with respect to other formulations and parts of the theory. The explicit definition of relevance and the comprehension procedure described in this chapter are one example; their criticism to the idea of associative processing is another (see chapter 2); the little attention given to the role of consciousness is still another (chapter 3); and finally, I do not think their commitment to modularity is fruitful (chapter 4).

In the second place, I subscribe to RT’s thesis that the notion of relevance has an important role to play not only in a theory of communication but also in a theory of cognition – as a matter of fact, the complete title of Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) is Relevance. Communication and Cognition. To be sure, we may presume that different notions of relevance lead to different views of communicative and cognitive processes. More specifically, in accordance with an assumption that is traditional in pragmatics, I propose that we should look to human (and especially, to verbal) communication as a special case of action, and therefore that the notion of relevance should be thought as related to the practical means-ends reasoning ability that is characteristic of humans. The main thesis I will be defending is that, in this perspective, the required notion of relevance is not the quantitative-informational one that we must attribute to RT if we take seriously both their definition of relevance and the heuristic they propose for its detection, but instead a qualitative one with regard to which, however, relevance theorists provide some clues, too.

1.3The Gricean background

To fully understand RT and, more generally, what is at stake in current cognitive pragmatics it is necessary to start from the analyses of Paul Grice. He proposes an inferential model of communication, and specifically of comprehension, as opposed to a model based on mere coding and decoding. The idea is that what a speaker means with an utterance (Grice refers to this meaning with the phrase “what is meant”) normally exceeds what the utterance says on the basis of its conventional meaning (“what is said”). In practice, the speaker selects an utterance insofar as she assumes that the addressee, given a context, is able to draw an inference from what the utterance says to what the speaker means with it in that context. Coding and decoding are thus merely components of a larger process, which also depends on information provided by the context and background knowledge that the speaker expects the addressee to exploit when interpreting an utterance.

For one simple example, if a telephone rings and someone shouts “I’m having a shower”, she plausibly intends to communicate something more than what the utterance says literally, for instance that she is not able to answer the phone and asks for someone else to do it. The context (the telephone ringing) and the knowledge we have of this kind of situations (a person who is having a shower is not in the best position to answer the phone; people living in the same flat expects a certain degree of cooperation from each other, etc.) allow the addressee to infer what is meant by the speaker in that circumstance from what is actually said.

On the whole, linguistic communication is conceived as a special case of intentional action, embedded within the larger framework of non-communicative intentional actions. In other words, the speaker is thought to be driven by a communicative intention that usually acquires its entire meaning as part of the specific activity it is embedded in. Participants to communicative interactions are thus seen as rational agents that pursue a variety of goals, both communicative and non-communicative, and adopt the contextually appropriate means – including linguistic ones – to pursue those goals. On the other hand, linguistic comprehension is conceived as a special case of the understanding of purposive action.

This is the background against which key Gricean notions such as the cooperative principle and conversational maxims have to be framed. In current pragmatics these notions are sometimes presented as if they were conventions that speakers have to conform to, while their crucial connection with rational action is somewhat neglected. In particular, more to our point, relevance theorists criticize the cooperative principle under the assumption that it is a normative convention prescribing the adoption of cooperative goals in communication. If this were the case, they would be right to object that speakers are sometimes guided by selfish, not cooperative, goals. But if we take a look at the way in which Grice (1975: 45) expresses it, it is rather apparent that the principle can be intended differently: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged”. Speaker and hearer have to share a common goal relative to the direction of the verbal exchange they are engaged in; they do not need to be cooperative relative to their behaviour as a whole. In other words, the speaker has to be cooperative in the limited sense of producing an utterance that, given the context and the shared knowledge, is rationally appropriate for the addressee to infer her communicative intention, and the addressee has to assume that the speaker will be rational in this precise sense.

In a sense, relevance theorists accept this minimal notion of cooperation, too (see also Reboul 2017 for a related distinction between altruistic and mutualistic – i.e., minimal – cooperation). As Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995: 268) put it, “we ourselves have stressed that interlocutors always share at least one common goal, that of understanding and being understood.” According to them, Grice is wrong insofar as he presumes instead that the participants to verbal exchanges need to be cooperative beyond what is required by merely understanding one another. Is this correct? On the one hand, Grice may in fact be suggesting that altruistic cooperation has a more fundamental relation to human communication than deceptive behaviour: which is not exactly the same as claiming that communication must always be cooperative in the strong sense – a few lines below, I mention a similar argument proposed by Tomasello. But I think that the main disagreement lies elsewhere: Grice’s approach is “normative” in the sense of assuming that human communication (be it truthful or deceptive) is a special case of means-ends reasoning, while according to RT this is not the case. In other words, what I think is really required by Grice is not that participants to verbal exchanges are not deceptive; it is rather that verbal exchanges – even when deceptive – are understood on the background of human activities and systems of goals.

Similar considerations apply to conversational maxims. By these Grice does not intend to provide a list of moral norms of communication. They are instead thought as key components (and there might be others) of the cooperative principle, accounting for how it actually ensures rationality. In other words, the maxims specify dimensions of rationality of the speaker’s communicative behaviour, and the related rational expectations on the part of the addressee. The maxims proposed by Grice (1975: 45–6) are four, and can be summarized as follows: try to make your contribution one that is true (quality); be informative (quantity); be relevant (relation); be perspicuous (manner). Of these, only the first may actually seem a sort of moral norm, although it should be noted that, since maxims are intended to describe general expectations, it has a clear rational ground, too: presumably, there would not be communication at all if speakers were not truthful as a normal case. Lies and deceptive communicative behaviour can only emerge on a background of cooperative expectations (on this, see Tomasello 2008: 190). The connection with practical reasoning is even more evident for the other maxims. Let us consider, for instance, how Grice (1975: 45) formulates the maxim of quantity (more precisely, its first half): “Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange)” (my emphasis: notably, the word “purposes” appears in the cooperative principle as well). As it can be seen, the amount of information is requested to be appropriate relative to the purposes of the exchange. In sum, the maxims aim to capture different respects in which an utterance can be rational as a means of accomplishing the communicative goals of the speaker.

The theoretical move made by RT with regard to the principle and the maxims is twofold. On the one hand, relevance theorists point out that their intent is to lay the foundations of cognitive pragmatics. Grice was aware that he was providing post hoc, rational reconstructions of comprehension processes, and that those reconstructions might not be implemented by actual reasoning-based psychological processes.2 RT, on the contrary, aims to provide an analysis of the actual cognitive processes, and coherently it proposes to replace the notions (the cooperative principle and the maxims) on which Grice based his rational reconstructions with specific cognitive mechanisms, that are maintained to be automatic and then quite different from explicit reasoning. On the other hand, the idea is that these mechanisms are essentially based on the search for relevance. The notion of relevance was explicitly mentioned by Grice in the maxim of relation (expressible as “be relevant”). In this respect, then, RT’s theoretical move amounts to assigning to this notion a more central, not to say exclusive, role.

Before I describe RT’s view in more detail, let me make two further comments on these theoretical moves. First, RT does not completely abandon the Gricean idea that utterance comprehension is a rational process, despite its being automatic. The idea is preserved in the assumption that the addressee builds up an inferential structure, formed by premises and conclusions, and that this non-demonstrative inference is in fact the core of the comprehension process. In Grice, however, as we noted, side-by-side with this propositional sense of rationality (the construction of inferences from premises to conclusions) a different sense of the word was at play: the one related to practical means-ends reasoning. This latter sense of rationality is indeed put in the background in RT’s theoretical framework. Second, as we will see, the notion of relevance adopted by RT has a quantitative character, being based on the idea of a cognitive tendency to maximise information. If we compare this idea with Grice’s maxim of quantity, the theoretical shift is evident: Grice speaks of the appropriateness of the amount of information with respect to the purposes of the communicators, while RT proposes an automatic mechanism aimed at maximising information without regard to the goals and the forms of rational action in which participants are involved.

1.4Relevance theory: a prologue

I have just claimed that RT gives up the Gricean intuition of comprehension as a form of practical reasoning based on goal recognition (cfr. Mazzone 2009), and replaces it with a mechanism based on the maximisation of information. Does any textual evidence support this view? This is actually the case. One year after Relevance, Sperber and Wilson published a synopsis of their book as a target article for the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and in answer to objections raised by commentators they wrote the following:

Some commentators […] think our definition of relevance fails to do justice to pretheoretical intuitions. Utterances are relevant, they feel, to purposes, goals, topics, questions, interests, or matters in hand. We define relevance in a context and to an individual. […] One reason we did not set out to define relevance to purpose, goal, and so on, is that we had no idea how to answer the analogous questions for any of these terms […] Given a definition of relevance in a context, and a method of context construction, however, there is no reason that assumptions about the goals and purposes of the individual, or of the participants in a conversation, should not for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Relevance
• 2 Associative and inferential processes
• 3 Automatic and controlled processes
• 4 Mindreading, pragmatics, and modularity
• 5 Rational and cognitive: an opposition?
• Conclusions
• References
• Name index
• Subject index