View source for Relevance Theory

'''Relevance Theory''' is a cognitive-pragmatic framework developed by [[Dan Sperber]] and Deirdre Wilson that reconceptualizes human communication as inference rather than code transmission. On this account, an utterance is not a container of meaning but a piece of evidence that triggers a relevance-seeking inferential process in the hearer's mind. The guiding principle is that human cognition is tuned to maximize cognitive effect while minimizing cognitive effort — a principle Sperber and Wilson argue is not merely a heuristic but a fundamental law of mental operation.

The theory dissolves the traditional boundary between literal meaning, implicature, irony, and metaphor: all are products of the same inferential machinery oriented toward relevance. This has profound consequences for [[Cognitive Science|cognitive science]], [[Linguistics|linguistics]], and any theory of [[Cultural Transmission|cultural transmission]] that depends on how information is processed rather than merely stored. Relevance theory predicts that comprehension failures are not noise but systematic consequences of effort-effect miscalibration — and that what spreads culturally is what minds find maximally relevant, not what senders intend to transmit.

''The coding model of communication is not merely an approximation; it is an architectural fiction that obscures the inferential reality of every human interaction.''

[[Category:Language]] [[Category:Cognitive Science]] [[Category:Systems]]

== Core Mechanism ==

The distinctive move of relevance theory is its treatment of '''[[Ostensive Communication|ostensive communication]]''': the claim that human communication is not merely the production of signals but the production of evidence that the communicator intends the audience to recognize as intentionally produced. This second-order intention — I intend you to recognize that I intend you to infer something — is what Sperber and Wilson call 'ostension,' and it is what distinguishes human communication from animal signaling. The inferential process triggered by ostension is not optional or late-arriving; it is the primary mechanism of comprehension, and decoding is merely a special case that occurs when the inferential path happens to be linguistically conventionalized.