the self-appointment of seuren as censor a reply to pieter seuren

Journal of Semantics 5: 145-162

D I S C U S S I O N

THE SELF-APPOINTMENT OF SEUREN AS CENSORA Reply to Pieter Seuren*

DEIRDRE WILSON and DAN SPERBER

Watching Seuren ridicule ideas that no sane person would hold is only mildlyamusing; having to discuss this exercise in shadow boxing is no fun at all. Yetwe must discuss it, since some readers may feel that they have learnt, fromSeuren's purported review of our book Relevance, all they need to knowabout its contents.

Seuren demonstrates a striking inability to grasp the structure of our book,its central arguments and themes. His 'summaries' are wild distortions. Histextual analyses are laughable. His 'objections' arc directed at non-existenttargets. A student of the irrational would be intrigued by the motivationsbehind this vast expense of wasted effort. Here, we will refrain from diag-nosis, and simply try to put right the most serious of Seuren's mistakes.

In Relevance, we distinguish three levels of analysis, three domains inwhich significant generalisations can be sought: the level of cognition, thelevel of communication, and the level of verbal communication. The firstchapter is about communication; the second and third chapters are aboutcognition; the fourth chapter is about verbal communication, and in particu-lar about utterance interpretation, or 'pragmatics'.

Seuren takes the central theme of our book to be 'the gap that existsbetween linguistically provided information and fully integrated comprehen-sion'. That is, he has chosen to ignore our careful distinction among levels ofanalysis, and to treat Relevance as a book about pragmatics. More precisely,he has chosen to treat the first three chapters (which are not about pragma-tics) as about pragmatics, and entirely ignore the last chapter, which is aboutpragmatics. Thus, the fundamental notions of our pragmatic theory are noteven mentioned, and chapter 4 is dismissed with the comment 'There is littleof interest to be found in these pages'. Well, not unless you want to know ourviews on pragmatics.

Before turning to Seuren's detailed comments, we will try to do what henotably fails to do: give some idea of the overall structure of the book. Inchapter I, we distinguish two models of communication, a code model and aninferential model; we argue that neither is reducible to the other, and thateither can occur independently of the other, though human verbal communi-cation involves them both. Inferential communication, we argue, exploitstwo fundamental facts about human cognition: that it involves the ability toperform inferences, and that it is geared to the search for relevance.

•Pieter A.M. Seuren: "The Self-Styling of Relevance'", this issue.

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In chapter 2, we describe the inferential abilities, both deductive andnon-demonstrative, which lie at the heart of human central thought pro-cesses: we show how these abilities, when applied to newly presented infor-mation, may modify the individual's existing representation of the world bygiving rise to contextual effects.

In chapter 3, still at the level of cognition, we characterise various notionsof relevance - relevance in a context, relevance to an individual, relevance of astimulus - in terms of the notions of contextual effect and processing effort.Up to this point, we have said nothing about the specific processes by whichverbal and non-verbal communication are understood. We go on tocharacterise a notion of optimal relevance and a principle of relevance which,we argue, do yield a strict and rigorous criterion for the interpretation of allinferential communication, verbal and non-verbal: the first interpretationtested and found consistent with the principle of relevance is the only inter-pretation consistent with the principle of relevance.

We go on, in the fourth and final chapter, to show how this criterionapplies to various aspects of utterance interpretation - disambiguation,reference assignment, enrichment, the recovery of implicatures, presupposi-tional and stylistic effects, metaphor, irony, speech acts and non-declarativesentences. This 80-page chapter, as stated in the introduction to our book, is acondensed version of a much larger work on pragmatics and rhetoric whichhas been in circulation for some years, extracts from which have already beenpublished;1 and on which we are still working.

Seuren, who takes the book as a whole to be about pragmatics, does noteven mention the notion of optimal relevance, the principle of relevance, orthe criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance, around which ourpragmatic theory is built, and finds 'little of interest' in our sketch of apragmatic theory in chapter 4. Many of his objections, then, are simply besidethe point. For example, he finds our neglect of presuppositions particularlydeplorable, yet he defines presuppositions as 'systematic properties of sen-tences' (our italics) - in which case there is little point in expecting them to betreated in chapters dealing with fundamental properties of communication(both verbal and non-verbal) and cognition.2 Such mistaken expectationspervade his review. On the other hand, we have searched the review in vainfor valid - indeed, for remotely plausible - criticisms.

We will now consider Seuren's 'objections', chapter by chapter, trying, atthe same time, to give a fuller idea of what our book is about. In chapter 1, wedistinguish coded communication from inferential communication. Whilecoded communication is quite easy to describe, inferential communication,which involves the use of central thought processes and the recognition of acommunicator's intention, is notoriously difficult, and our aim is to sketch anexplanatory account of how such communication takes place. Inferentialcommunication, we argue, involves two types of intention: the informativeintention - to make a certain set of assumptions manifest, or more manifest,to an audience; and the communicative intention - to make the informativeintention mutually manifest.

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MANIFEST FACTS AND ASSUMPTIONS

In Relevance, fact, assumption and manifest are technical terms. A fact is atrue proposition. An assumption is a thought which is taken to represent afact. A fact is manifest to an individual on two conditions: first, he must becapable of representing it; and second, he must have enough evidence toaccept this representation as true or possibly true, i.e. as an assumption. By aquite standard process of extension (using predicates which take propositionsas arguments to apply, as well, to utterances or thoughts which representthose propositions), we use 'manifest' (and other predicates such as 'infer-able') to apply not only to facts but to assumptions. Our reason for doing so(which is again standard) is that, from a psychological point of view, falseassumptions play essentially the same role as true ones (just as mispcrcep-tions play the same psychological role as true perceptions), and we wanttherefore to be able talk in the same terms of all assumptions, whether theyactually represent facts or not.

Seuren strenuously objects to our using 'manifest' for both facts andassumptions. Yet he himself talks of 'true facts' and of'true thoughts': howcan this standard kind of extension be all right for him and not for us? Whydoes he have trouble in grasping our technical use of'fact' and 'assumption'(which is not particularly original)? His 'powers of comprehension arestretched even more', he ironizes, by the fact that we define 'manifest' in sucha way that facts and assumptions can be manifest (i.e. evidenced and accessi-ble via perception or inference) without actually being entertained. Yet thenotion of a possible thought should place no great mental strain on someonefamiliar with the notion of a possible world.

Indeed Seuren, stretching not just his powers of comprehension but alsohis altruism, ends up saying: 'my most charitable interpretation is that whatSW wish to regard as manifest assumptions are possible justified assumptionsas well as justified assumptions actually made'. What charity? What powersof comprehension? Seuren is merely paraphrasing a point we repeatedlymake (pp.39-41). At his 'most charitable', he consents, after much sneering,to understand what we are saying more or less as we are saying it. Most of thetime, feeling less generous, he stops short at the sneers.

COMMUNICATING AND CONVINCING

The definition of inferential communication is theoretically complex, butcognitively simple: for successful communication to take place, all theaddressee has to do is recognise the communicator's informative intention:he does not have to believe what he is being told, and he does not have torecognise the communicator's communicative intention at all.

Seuren's failure to grasp the notion of manifestness leads him to misun-derstand the informative intention too. It follows from the informative

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intention, he decides, that the speaker 'must try to convince the hearer, (orreinforce the hearer's conviction) of the truth of what he intends to say' - aconclusion which he rejects on the familiar ground that communication canbe successful when the speaker is not trying to convince the hearerof the truthof what is said.

There are three mistakes here. First, since an assumption can be mademanifest without actually being entertained, the informative intention is notan intention to convince. Second, as we state explicitly (pp. 29-30), communi-cation is successful when the informative intention is recognised, not when itis fulfilled: in other words, when the addressee knows what set of assumptionsthe communicator wants to make manifest, whether or not he is actually ledto believe them. And third, the set of assumptions which the speaker wants tomake manifest or more manifest may or may not include the propositionexplicitly expressed by the utterance - in Gricean terms, what was said. This istrue, rather obviously, in the case of metaphor and irony, but also in the lessobvious case where, for example, Mary knows that Peter will not believe whatshe says, but wants to communicate that she believes it nonetheless. Scurenbelieves we have missed cases of this kind, and tries to use them against us. Ifhe had found the time to read our fourth chapter, he might have discoveredthat we analyse such a case ourselves (p. 181), not as a threatening counter-example, but, on the contrary, as a possibility following quite naturally fromour theory. This is because the widespread idea that an utterance can berelevant only through the proposition explicitly expressed has no place in ourframework. An utterance, like any other phenomenon, makes manifest avariety of assumptions and can achieve relevance through any combinationof these.

COGNITIVE ISSUES

The question raised by this account of communication is: how are thecommunicator's informative intentions recognised? An informal answer iseasy enough: addressees assume that communicators aim at certain stan-dards, and use this assumption in evaluating hypotheses about the communi-cator's informative intentions. But what are the standards? Where do theycome from? How are alternative hypotheses arrived at and evaluated? In anattempt to answer these questions, we move to the level of cognition inchapters 2 and 3.

In chapter 2, we develop an account of the central inferential abilities thatunderlie spontaneous human thought. Deductive inferences, we claim, areperformed by a deductive device which takes as input a set of assumptions,and derives as output the full set of its non-trivial implications (a technicalterm discussed below). Non-demonstrative 'inferences' are a heterogeneousset of processes by which assumptions are assigned an initial degree ofstrength depending on their source (e.g. in perception, communication or

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deductive inference), and this initial degree of strength is modified by theirsubsequent processing history.

When a newly presented assumption is added to a set of existing assump-tions - a context - in the memory of the deductive device, it may significantlymodify the context on one of three ways. It may strengthen an existingassumption; it may contradict and eliminate an existing assumption; or itmay combine with existing assumptions to yield a contextual implication -that is, a non-trivial implication based on at least one premise drawn from thecontext and at least one premise drawn from the newly presented informa-tion. These three types of contextual modification we call contextual effects;they form the basis, in chapter 3, for our characterisation of relevance.

Seuren takes chapter 2 to be 'devoted to the inferential element in compre-hension: the fact that tacit premises often have to be invoked in order to showthe relevance of an utterance (often a reply)'. He comments: 'SW hold thatsuch inferential chains are formal deductive procedures, and not some "looseform of inferencing".... This is perhaps so, though plausibility-based anddefault procedures cannot be ruled out.' In fact, the chapter is about neitherutterances nor the processes by which 'tacit premises' (i.e. contexts) arechosen: those topics are left to chapters 3 and 4. The chapter is about theinferential processes which apply to a given set of premises when some newlypresented information is added to them. The idea that contexts can bededuced from newly presented information is absurd.

A fundamental assumption of our book, as of much recent work incognitive science, is that humans have a conceptual representation system, or'language of thought', which differs from human natural language in itscapacity for unambiguous, referentially unambivalent expression. Someconceptual representations have a unique sense and reference: in our terms,they mt fully propositional, and capable as they stand of being true or false.We suggest, however, that not all conceptual representations have this pro-perty: humans are capable of entertaining and processing incomplete assump-tion schemas, which require the addition of further conceptual material tobecome fully propositional. Assumption schemas, we suggest, are an impor-tant source of hypotheses in human thought.

Seuren has difficulty with the distinction between propositional represen-tations and assumption schemas. We claim, for example, that since the senseof a (natural language) referential expression docs not uniquely determine itsreferent, the sense of a sentence containing referential expressions is anassumption schema rather than a fully propositional representation. We usea sentence containing pronouns to illustrate. Seuren seems in doubt aboutwhether our claim extends to definite NPs. That the answer is'yes'should gowithout saying: any sentence whose sense does not uniquely determine itsreference corresponds to an assumption schema, which requires the additionof further conceptual material to become fully propositional.3

This decision is not arbitrary. It follows from some basic assumptions thatwe share with many others working in the field of cognitive science: that it is

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primarily thoughts, not sentences, that have semantic interpretations; thathumans have no access to the semantic interpretations of their own thoughts;and hence that distinct thoughts, representing distinct states of affairs, mustbe formally distinct. It follows trivially that utterances which express distinctthoughts, representing different states of affairs, must be assigned distinctconceptual representations. The fact that these assumptions are incompatiblewith much current practice in formal semantics merely suggests that muchcurrent practice in formal semantics will have to be modified if it is to interactfruitfully with cognitive science.

FINAL THESES

Fundamental to our notion of contextual modification, and in particular ofcontextual implication, is our characterisation of the deductive inferencerules available to the deductive device. We claim that the only such rules areelimination rules. More generally, we claim that the deductive device com-putes only non-trivial implications, where a set of assumptions {P} non-tri-vially implies an assumption Q iff, when {P} is the set of initial theses in aderivation involving only elimination rules, Q belongs to the set of finaltheses.

Seuren has difficulty understanding what we mean by 'final theses'. Wemean, as is made clear in our description of the deductive device the set oftheses contained in the memory of the deductive device at the end of adeductive process: that is, the set of initial theses, plus the set of derived thesesobtained by exhaustive application of the available elimination rules. Seurenpretends to think that we mean neither the set of initial theses, nor the set ofderived theses, but the subset of derived theses to which no further elimi-nation rules can be applied: since he does not know which these are, hedismisses the notion of non-trivial implication - which is fundamental to ourframework - as vacuous. How can Seuren reconcile this interpretation, whichhas no basis whatsoever in our text, with the fact that we point out (p. 104)that every assumption analytically, and therefore, by our definitions, non-tri-vially, implies itself? The answer seems to be that Seuren is so sure that ourideas are inconsistent that any inconsistency in his interpretation of our ideasseems to him a confirmation of his view.

ELIMINATION RULES

Seuren also objects to our empirical claim that spontaneous human thoughthas access only to elimination rules. In the book, we consider an objectiononce made to this proposal by Gazdar and Good (1982), who claimed that therules of or-introduction and anc/-introduction were needed to cope withcertain intuitively valid derivations - for example, (1) and (2):

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(1) a.b.

c.

a.b.c.

IfP

R

IfP

Q

(P

(P

or Q), then R

and Q), then R(2)

d. R

In our original reply to Gazdar and Good (Sperber and Wilson 1982), weshowed how (1) and (2) could be dealt with in a framework without introduc-tion rules. It is quite simple to conceive of an elimination rule (we call itdisjunctive modus ponens) taking (la) (lb) as premises, and yielding (lc)directly as conclusion; it is quite simple to conceive of an elimination rule (wecall it conjunctive modus ponens) taking (2a) and (2b) as premises, andyielding 'If Q then R' as conclusion - from which (2d) would follow by asimple step of modus ponens based on (2c). We suggested that these deriva-tions for (1) and (2) were psychologically more plausible than the 'standard'derivations using introduction rules. Subsequently, we found independentempirical support for our proposed derivation of (1) in the work of thepsychologist Lance Rips (1983); this was cited and discussed in Relevance.Though Rips did not consider derivations like (2), we offered a number ofreasons for thinking that (1) and (2) would be handled along similar lines,using elimination rules of the type we proposed.

Seuren ignores our discussion of (1) entirely, and wildly misinterprets ourdiscussion of (2). We claim that the human mind has direct access to a rule ofconjunctive modus ponens, which takes as input premises of the form 'If Pand Q, then R'and'P', and yields as output conclusions of the form if Q thenR\ The resulting derivation of (2) is no longer than the standard derivationusing anrf-introduction - and a derivation of (1) using disjunctive modusponens is actually shorter than the standard derivation. Seuren claims,however, that the derivations we propose are more complex than the stan-dard derivations. He takes us to have admitted that this is so, and concludesthat in our framework 'cognition goes for the more complex procedures,surely a most unattractive position'.

What we actually say (p. 99) is that derivations involving introduction rulesare 'the simplest derivations in most standard logics using primitive rulesalone' [OUT italics]. We point out, however, that any standard logic wouldpermit the use of conjunctive and disjunctive modus ponens as derived rules,and go on to make the empirical claim that these rules are directly accessibleto the deductive device. As noted above, the resulting derivations -which wework through in detail (pp. 98-100) are no more complex - and much morepsychologically plausible (see pp. 99-103) - than the standard derivationsusing introduction rules.4

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CONTEXTUAL EFFECTS

Seuren turns next to contextual effects. 'No definition is given', he claims, 'ofthe notion of contextual effect'. In fact, the notion is informally defined onpage 117 and formally defined in footnote 26, p. 260. Moreover, we describeat length the three significant ways in which newly presented informationmay have a contextual effect: (a) by combining with the context to yield acontextual implication; (b) by strengthening an existing contextual assump-tion; and (c) by contradicting and eliminating an existing contextual assump-tion. Seuren feels that a criterion of 'relatedness' between newly presentedinformation and existing assumptions must somehow be involved. He addsthat since this criterion is not elaborated, 'one must rely on one's intuitions inapplying it'. Seuren is free to do what he likes. The fact is, though, that a'criterion of relatcdness' plays nor role whatsoever in our theory. On thecontrary: the characterisation of contextual effects is meant to explain pre-theoretical intuitions of relatedness via its role in the characterisation ofrelevance, to which we turn in chapter 3.

EFFECT AND EFFORT

A theory of human cognition must describe not only the inferential processesby which assumptions about the world are manipulated, but also the goals ofcognition itself. Why do humans attend to one phenomenon rather thananother, assign this phenomenon one conceptual representation rather thananother, and process this representation in one context rather than another?We argue that human cognition is relevance-oriented: humans tend to payattention to the most relevant phenomena, assign them the most relevantpossible conceptual representations, and process them in contexts that maxi-mise their relevance. Relevance is characterised in terms of contextual effectsand processing effort: the greater the contextual effects, the greater therelevance, and the smaller the processing effort required to obtain theseeffects - that is, to assign the phenomenon a particular conceptual represen-tation, to access a particular context, and to derive the contextual effects ofthe chosen representation in the chosen context - the greater the relevance.

If communication takes place against this cognitive background, it followsthat a communicator, by demanding an addressee's attention, suggests thatthe information she wants to communicate, when processed in a context shebelieves her addressee to have accessible, will be relevant enough to be worthhis attention. This general principle, that inferential communication creates apresumption of relevance, we call the principle of relevance. At the end ofchapter 3, we argue that it yields a strict and rigorous criterion for theinterpretation of utterances: the first interpretation tested and found consist-ent with the principle of relevance is the only interpretation consistent withthe principle of relevance, and is the one the hearer should choose. The

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principle of relevance, and the criterion of consistency with the principle ofrelevance, lie at the heart of our theory of inferential communication. Seurendoes not even mention them.

What he does is make some transparently silly remarks about our characte-risation of relevance. For example, we say (p. 122) that'it might be tempting'to define relevance in terms of contextual effects alone. We go on to explain(pp. 123-5) why this temptation should be resisted: why both contextualeffects and processing effort need to be taken into account. Seuren gives theimpression that we endorse the earlier definition, and then accuses us of'unaccountably' replacing it with the second. It is his own behaviour whichseems unaccountable to us.

Seuren goes on to claim that appeals to processing effort are illegitimate inany framework. He echoes with approval a remark attributed to GazdarandGood (1982), that 'so little is known about "processing cost" that any claimin this direction is, in fact, empirically vacuous'. Many psycholinguists andcognitive psychologists would be surprised to hear this. It is a commonplaceof the cognitive literature that, for example, frequency and recurrency of use- of words, constructions, processing strategics, concepts and assumptions -affect processing effort. Processing time is an important indicator of proces-sing effort, which is measured and manipulated with some sophistication inexperimental work on language perception and comprehension. Any humanknows that some phenomena - linguistic structures, logical structures,objects, events - are easier to understand than others; that some contextualassumptions are easier to access in some circumstances than in others.Considerations of effort play a major role in all human activity, both physicaland mental, and cannot be ignored.5

In the case of verbal communication at least, it is relatively easy to showthat intuitions about processing effort must be taken into account. Here is anexample. Grice has a maxim of brevity which, however brevity is measured,runs into difficulty with utterances like the following:

(3) I have no siblings.(4) I have no brothers or sisters.

It is clear that by any criteria, (3) is shorter than (4), which should thus, in aframework with a maxim of brevity, be predicted as less stylistically appro-priate than (3). Yet most English informants, on most occasions, would judge(4), not (3), to be the more stylistically appropriate. A consideration ofprocessing effort suggests an explanation. The English word 'sibling', thoughshort, is also very rare, and may thus be quite costly to process - more costly,it seems, than the longer expression 'brothers or sisters'. In other words, theintuitions underlying Grice's maxim of brevity might be more accuratelydescribed as intuitions - rather stable and subtle intuitions, as these examplesshow - about processing effort. If we are right, then intuitions about stylisticappropriateness may eventually shed new light on the factors affectingprocessing effort itself.

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CIRCULARITY

Seuren turns next to our remarks about context selection, echoing withapproval a claim made by Wilks (1986), that the method of context selectionwe envisage makes our definition of relevance circular. He says: 'For if thedetermination of the context C for an assumption A is part of the processingof A, then the relevance of A may involve a search for a suitable C, sot that Ais relevant, but it makes no sense to speak of the relevance of A in C. Theobjection seems valid...' It may seem valid to Seuren: to us it merely seemshard to parse. To see that the argument underlying the objection is invalidconsider the formally identical argument where 'relevance' in replaced by'solubility': suppose a definition of 'solubility in a liquid' is given and used todescribe the behaviour of a chemist who is trying to dissolve various sub-stances and, for each, looks for the most effective liquid; then, Wilks andSeuren should argue, the definition of solubility becomes circular for if thedetermination of the liquid L for a substance S is part of the processing of S,then the solubility of S may involve a search for a suitable L, so that S issoluble, but it makes no sense to speak of the solubility of Sin L.' This is silly,because of the very structure of the argument, and so is Wilks' and Seuren'sargument, whose structure we have faithfully reproduced.

What Wilks probably had in mind, and should have said, is that a defini-tion of relevance in a context is insufficient if one claims, as we do, that therelevance-governed processing of information does not take place in a fixedcontext but involves the search for an optimal context. This is why, in thebook, which Wilks had not read when he grandly accused us of circularity,but which Seuren is supposed to be reviewing, we do not stop at the definitionof relevance in a context but go on, on the basis of this first definition, todefine relevance for an individual, i.e. for a mechanism capable of accessing avariety of contexts. However, this takes place on pp. 142-151, and, by then,less than halfway through the book, Seuren's interest has flagged. He dis-misses the rest of the book in a single page. Here we will summarise the basicclaims Seuren neglects, and contrast them with claims he attributes to usearlier in his review.

RELEVANCE AND ATTENTION

For the individual, we claim, the effort required to process some newly-pre-sented item of information consists of (a) the effort required to access acontext, and (b) the effort required to derive the contextual effects of the newinformation in that context. The greater the contextual effects, the greater therelevance, and the smaller the processing effort required, the greater therelevance. Different choices of context yield different contextual effects, andrequire different amounts of processing effort. We claim that humans tend toprocess each newly-presented item as productively as possible: that is, to

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obtain as many contextual effects from it as possible, given the availableprocessing resources. Processing resources are scarce; more information isaccessible at a given moment than anyone can hope to deal with. It is quitenatural to assume that the human cognitive system has tended towards amaximally efficient use of the available processing resources, and hence,towards selection of a context in which the newly presented information canbe most productively processed.

Relevance theory thus provides a general answer to some fundamentalcognitive questions: which phenomena should the individual attend to, whichconceptual representations should he assign to those phenomena, and howshould he process these representations? More specific answers depend on theindividual's actual cognitive abilities (e.g. his perceptual abilities, the organi-sation of his memory) and his physical environment: in our terms, on hiscognitive environment. What makes communication possible is that humans,at least to some extent, share cognitive environments, and are thus able, atleast to some extent, to predict each other's allocation of processingresources. It is against this cognitive background that our theory of commu-nication is set.

RELEVANCE AND COMMUNICATION

A communicator, by demanding an addressee's attention, creates a presump-tion of relevance. She suggests, that is, that her utterance (or other act ofinferential communication) is relevant enough to be worth the addressee'sattention. But how relevant is that? Here, our claims are quite precise. Tosatisfy the presumption of relevance, an utterance must meet two conditions.First, it must achieve enough contextual effects, at a small'enough processingcost, to be worth the addressee's attention: that is, it must be more relevantthan any other phenomenon in the addressee's cognitive environment. Sec-ond, it must put the addressee to no unjustifiable processing effort: that is, itmust be the most relevant utterance (or other act of inferential communica-tion) that the communicator could have used to achieve the intended contex-tual effects.

An utterance which satisfies these two conditions we call optimally rele-vant. By demanding an addressee's attention, then, a communicator creates apresumption of optimal relevance. And the fact that she does so, we call theprinciple of relevance.

Now the fact that an utterance creates a presumption of optimal relevancedoes not mean that it will actually be optimally relevant to the hearer. Thehearer may be unable to find an interpretation on which it is optimallyrelevant to him. or one on which a rational speaker might have thought itwould be so. When such an interpretation can be found, we say that theutterance, on this interpretation, is consistent with the principle of relevance.We show that every utterance has at most a single interpretation consistentwith the principle of relevance.

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Suppose, for example, that an utterance may be taken to express one of twopropositions, PI and P2. Suppose, furthermore, that it is manifest in theshared cognitive environment of speaker and hearer that (a) PI is moreaccessible to the hearer than P2; (b) the hearer has access to a context Cl inwhich P1 has enough contextual effects to be worth his attention (call this setof effects El); (c) there is no more accessible context in which PI would haveenough contextual effects to be worth the hearer's attention; and (d) there isno alternative utterance (more generally, act of inferential communication)which would have achieved the set of effects El more economically. Then theoverall interpretation which consists of selecting PI and processing it incontext Cl to obtain the set of effects El is consistent with the principle ofrelevance - and is, moreover, the only interpretation consistent with theprinciple of relevance.

For suppose the speaker, to whom by hypothesis all these facts are mani-fest, had nonetheless intended to express proposition P2 rather than PI. Theresulting interpretation - however relevant - would not be consistent with theprinciple of relevance, because it would put the hearer to the unjustifiableprocessing effort of, first, recovering and processing PI, next, recovering andprocessing P2, and then engaging in some further form of inference to decidebetween the two interpretations. All this the speaker could have spared himby simply rephrasing her utterance to eliminate PI entirely, or to make P2more accessible than PI.

What goes for disambiguation and reference assignment goes equally fordetermination of the intended context and contextual effects. Suppose it ismanifest in the shared cognitive environment of speaker and hearer that (a)context Cl is more accessible than context C2; (b) context Cl will combinewith the proposition expressed by the utterance to yield enough contextualeffects, for a small enough processing effort, to be worth the hearer's atten-tion; and (c) no other utterance would have achieved these effects moreeconomically. Then an interpretation based on context C2 and its associatedcontextual effects, however relevant, would not be consistent with the princi-ple of relevance, because it would put the hearer to some unjustifiableprocessing effort.

We show, more generally, that in every aspect of utterance interpretationinvolving the resolution of indeterminacies - of content, context or contex-tual effects - the first accessible interpretation consistent with the principle ofrelevance is the only assumption consistent with the principle of relevance,and is the one a rational hearer should choose. In chapter 4, we illustrate theapplication of this criterion to every aspect of utterance interpretation. Let uscompare the resulting theory with some comments made by Seuren in hisreview.

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SEUREN'S IRRELEVANCIES

Take Seuren's remark that 'there will be few utterances that fail to give rise tosome inference together with some background knowledge. But most of theseSW will want to rule out as irrelevant', as indeed we would. There are twomistakes here. First, it follows from our definition of relevance that anutterance is relevant to the individual if it has contextual effects in somecontext accessible to him. We discuss this issue at length (pp. 118-123), andexplain why intuitions may be hazy on this point.

They may be hazy because where utterances are involved, people haveintuitions not only about relevance but about consistency with the principleof relevance, and the two sets of intuitions do not coincide. An utterance maybe relevant on a given interpretation without being consistent with theprinciple of relevance on that interpretation; it may be consistent with theprinciple of relevance on a given interpretation without being relevant at all(for example, when you tell me something I already know).

Seuren mistakenly assumes throughout his review that we regard thesearch for relevance as the key to recovery of intended contexts and contex-tual effects. As shown above, what we argue is something quite different. Inthe interpretation of inferential communication, and in particular in therecovery of intended contexts and contextual effects, it is the criterion ofconsistency with the principle of relevance which is crucial. As we have alsoshown, this criterion is powerful enough to exclude all but a single interpreta-tion - a single intended context, a single set of contextual effects - for anyutterance. Seuren does not even acknowledge its existence.

Consider, in this light, Seuren's comments on our example (5):

(5) a. Flag-seller. Would you like to buy a flag for the Royal NationalLifeboat Institution?

b. Passer-by: No thanks, I always spend my holidays with my sisterin Birmingham.

We point out that in order to recover the intended interpretation of (5b), thehearer must be able to access the assumption that someone who is not likelyto need the services of a charity cannot be expected to subscribe to thatcharity - an assumption which is typically not manifest to everyone. Here,Seuren comments, 'SW cross metaborders unaware: they fail to distinguish,for a proposition P, between taking P as true, and taking P as believed to betrue by an interlocutor. Yet P has a very different status in one case and in theother.' Indeed - or rather, almost.

The distinction between assumptions that are actually true and those thatare merely entertained as true has no place in a theory of cognitive psycho-logy based on the assumption set out above: that the individual has no accessto the semantic interpretations of his beliefs, and is thus unable to distinguishbetween what he knows and what he believes (or more generally, assumes).

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He can, of course, distinguish between his own assumptions and those ofothers; or between assumptions that are manifest to him and those that aremanifest to others. We claim that he can also distinguish between assump-tions that are merely manifest to him and those that are mutually manifest tohim and his interlocutor - or at least are treated as such. It is from the latterclass of assumptions that intended contexts are drawn.

Often, a speaker treats as mutually manifest an assumption that, before shespoke, was not manifest to her hearer at all. This is the source of what Seurencalls 'backward suppletion' (generally known as 'bridging implicature'), andother examples involving implicated contextual assumptions. Suppose Marysays to Peter:

(6) John entered the room. Both windows were open.

In assigning reference to the expression 'both windows' in (6), Peter typicallyhas to assume that the room John entered had two windows. This assumption- though easily accessible to him as a hypothesis via his encyclopaedicknowledge that rooms may have one or more windows - may not have beenmanifest to him before Mary spoke: that is, he may have had no more reasonto believe that the room had two windows, than that it had one or three. Bytreating this assumption as mutually manifest - that is, by producing anutterance which is optimally relevant only in a context containing thisassumption - Mary provides indirect evidence that she believes it; and if Petertrusts her, he will believe it too.

In just the same way, the passer-by in (5b) treats it as mutually manifest tohimself and his hearer that someone who has no need of the services of acharity cannot be expected to subscribe to that charity. The structure of theinterpretation process is the same for (5b) as for (6): the only difference is thatan altruistic hearer may have difficulty actually accessing the requiredcontextual assumption, and having seen that it is required, is most unlikely toaccept it as true on the evidence of a passing stranger.

Seuren's claim (and the earlier claim of Wilks 1986) that we are unable tomake the subtle distinctions between speaker's and hearer's beliefs, and theirbeliefs about each other's beliefs, needed in pragmatic theory, are thereforegratuitous. We discuss these issues at length and provide a framework forsolving them in terms of manifestness which, we claim, is more psychologi-cally realistic than the usual 'mutual knowledge' framework.

'PERTINENT CRITICISMS'

We would like to end with three more general comments. The first is ratherminor. In a number of places, Seuren refers to published criticisms of an earlypaper of ours, by Gazdar and Good, Moore, Wilks, and Clark, remarkingthat these 'pertinent criticisms.... do not seem to have been either heeded or

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countered'. In fact, we made detailed replies at the time, which were publish-ed in Smith (1982) along with our original paper and the criticisms of Gazdar,Good, et.al. Seuren nowhere refers to these replies6. No doubt there will comea day when someone will say, with equal good faith, that we have neitherheeded nor countered Scuren's 'pertinent criticisms'.

Not only has Seuren failed to notice these earlier replies; he seems unawaretoo of the fact that the theory defended in Relevance is not the same as the onepresented in our earlier papers (see note 11, p. 26, where we draw attention tothe difference between our original principle of maximal relevance and ourcurrent principle of optimal relevance). If Seuren wishes to go on citingGazdar, Good, et.al., he had better make sure that their objections apply tothe theory we defend.

This kind of sloppiness is displayed throughout the text. Seuren accuses usof failing to deal with objections which are fully dealt with, of failing to givedefinitions which are explicitly given, and of failing to discuss issues whicharc carefully discussed. To take just one example not already mentioned,Seuren wonders whether our account of inferential communication 'excludesquestions, commands, and other non-assertive speech acts. SW arc notexplicit on this'. If he had finished the book (or even the table of contents), hewould have noticed that speech acts in general, and the semantics andpragmatics of non-declarative sentences, are explicitly dealt with in chapter 4,section 10.7

CONTEXT AND CONCERN

The second, more substantial, comment has to do with Seuren's own precon-ceptions about the nature of relevance, which he takes us to share. Seurenregards it as uncontroversial that to see the point of an utterance is to see howit is relevant 'with respect to a concern'. Where we talk of relevance in acontext, he feels free to replace our reference to contexts with reference toconcerns. We strongly reject the identification of contexts with concerns.Contexts are sets of assumptions: we define relevance with respect to acontext, describe how contexts are accessed, what it is to process an assump-tion in a context, and what the effects of such processing might be. Bycontrast, we have no idea (and we doubt if Seuren has either) what a 'concern'might be, or how an utterance might be relevant with respect to a concern.

Clearly, there would be little point in defining relevance if the definitionitself made appeal to an unanalysed notion of 'concern'. One of the mainrecommendations of our approach to relevance is that it makes no appeal tosuch unanalysed notions. To the extent that systematic pretheoretical intui-tions exist about relatedness, interests or concerns, we claim that they can besatisfactorily explicated in terms of our notion of relevance, eliminating theneed for technical definitions of'relatedness', 'interest' and 'concern'. Giventhe total lack of anything approaching a technical definition of these terms,this is a substantial claim, and one that should surely be welcomed.

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THE REVIEWER'S DUTY AND RIGHT

A reviewer has a duty and a right. The duty is to inform readers of thecontents of the book reviewed. The right is to express his own opinion of it.Seuren is much keener to exercise his right than to perform his duty. Whileaccusing us of 'inadequate treatment of the literature and uneven handling oftopics' he confines himself to discussing only the first half of our book. Thus,all but four of his sixty quotations are from the first 140 pages of our 254-pagetext; thirty-five of these quotations are from the second (and shortest) chap-ter. As we have shown, Seuren does not even give an adequate account of thefew passages which he finds worth discussing, or rather denouncing, orexplain how they fit in with the general design of the book. In fact, he utterlyfails to represent the contents of Relevance.

By contrast, Seuren makes his opinion of the book very clear. Given histheoretical choices, which are very different from ours, we would not haveexpected Seuren to be convinced by our arguments; we would have welcomeda reasoned expression of disagreement which, though it might not haveconvinced us, might have highlighted genuine problems and contrastedtheoretical alternatives.

But Seuren does not merely disagree, nor does he feel that we offer aconceivable alternative. Once in a while, a reviewer gets a book which doesnot meet basic standards of scholarship and which should not have beenpublished in the first place. It then becomes not just the reviewer's right buthis duty to publicise the fact and warn the community. Seuren felt that thissituation had arisen with our book: he felt it incumbent upon himself todiscuss it in detail 'mainly to warn against a creeping tendency, manifest inpragmatic writings these days, not to apply normal standards of precisionand scholarship'. He then took an authoritarian stance, and felt free torebuke us with scorn and sarcasm. Thus he talks of our 'loose and inconse-quential way', our making 'a mess of things', his 'mounting amazement', ourfailing to maintain 'a minimum of coherence', our 'tortuous and longwindedpath', our 'turgid text', our 'undeserving formal workmanship', our getting'entangled in absurdities', our 'verbose text', our 'dodging', etc.

Before taking such a stance and levelling such abuse at colleagues, one hadbetter make sure that one is not misled by one's own theoretical biases, or bythe fact that one's work is attacked (or, worse, ignored) in the book underreview; or by personal considerations of any kind; one had better make surethat the case is incontrovertible. Seuren's case is non-existent. His verbalviolence is totally unjustified. He claims that our calling the set of hypotheseswe put forward a 'theory' is 'an improper appropriation of prestige'. Wewould like to know what Seuren considers to be worthy of the name 'theory'in pragmatics, if our work is not. In any case, prestige accrues to goodtheories; bad theories end up being an embarrassment to their authors. Onthe other hand, when Seuren appoints himself our censor, and the defender oftrue scholarship against unworthy colleagues, he commits an utterly impro-

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per appropriation of authority; he is the one who ought to be embarrassed.There is one way though, in which Seuren's attack might cause one to

doubt relevance theory. According to this theory, homo sapiens systemati-cally tries to interpret new information as relevantly as possible. Seuren.hasdone his best to interpret our book as irrelevantly as possible. Is he, then, aliving counterexample to the theory? A more conservative explanation can begiven: for Scuren, the assumption that our book would be totally irrelevantwas more relevant than anything he expected to find in the book, and so, hetried to interpret our book so as to maximize overall relevance, and he did agreat job of it.

Department of LinguisticsUniversity College LondonGower StreetLondon WCIE6BTUKandCHRSI Universiti de Paris X

NOTES

1. See, e.g., Sperberand Wilson (1981, 1982a-d, 1986); Wilson and Sperber (1979,1981,1986a,1986b, forthcoming).2. Our account of presuppositions (including, despite his denials, an account of the type ofexamples that interest Seuren) is given in Relevance chapter 4, section 5. An earlier account waspublished in Wilson and Sperber (1979).3. Seuren also seriously mistakes the role of assumption schemas in our framework. He regardsthem as devices for inferring one assumption from another, saying: 'Assumptions are also takento be derivable from assumptions in virtue of fixed schemata. Thus. . . when an assumption ofthe form "If P then Q" is encoded for transmission, the hearer will weakly infer "If not-P thennot-Q", and also "If Q, then Q because P". Such formaion of assumptions is consideredstandard'. What we actually say in the passage cited is that when available assumptions fit theschema 'If P then Q', assumptions of the form 'If not-P then not-Q' and 'If Q, then Q because P*are standardly considered. That is, when entertaining assumptions of a certain form, humansstandardly consider whether they have evidence for certain assumptions of related form. There isno talk of utterances, there is no talk of hearers, and there is no talk of inference. We are merelysuggesting a possible procedure for hypothesis formation; the resulting hypotheses to beevaluated, as always, in the light of additional contextual assumptions. Seuren's 'counterexam-ples' in (9) merely illustrate a variety of cases in which the standard hypotheses prove false.

4. Here, Seuren may have been confused by his own unargued assumption that we are using astandard first-order logic, supplemented in various ways. We nowhere make such a commit-ment. Indeed, we envisage an entirely non-standard treatment of existential quantification,which readers who know something of the formal properties of phrase-structure trees may beable to work out from the tree given on the last page of Seuren's review.5. Moreover, suppose that virtually nothing were known about processing effort, but that it didplay a role in communication and cognition. The claim that it did so, and speculations about therole it played, would surely not be vacuous.6. We elaborate on some of these replies in Relevance. For example, our description ofderivations (1) and (2) above (which Seuren treats as a response to an objection from an'imaginary opponent') develops our original reply to Gazdar and Good. See also note 3. p. 262.7. For an elaboration of these views, see Wilson and Sperber (forthcoming).

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REFERENCES

Dark, H., 1982: The relevance of common ground In: Smith (ed.).

Cole, P., (ed.) 1981: Radical Pragmatics. Academic Press, New York.Dancy, J., Moravcsik, J. and Taylor, C. (edi.) to appear Language and Value. Stanford Univer-

sity Press, Stanford.Gazdar, G. and Good, D., 1981 On a notion of relevance. In Smith (ed.)Myers, T., Brown, K. and McGonigle, B. (eds.), 1986: Reasoning and Discourse Processes.

Academic Press, London.Oh, C.-K. and Dinneen, D., (edj.) 1979: Syntax and Semantics II: Presuppositions. Academic

Press, New York.Rips, L., 1983: Cognitive processes in proposition!] reasoning. Psychological Review 90.1:38-71.Smith, N. (ed.), 1982: Mutual knowledge. Academic Press, London.Sperber, D. and Wilson, D., 1981: Irony and the use-mention distinction. In: Cole (ed.).Sperbcr, D. and Wilson, D., 1982a: Mutual knowledge and relevance in theories of comprehen-

sion. In: Smith (ed.).Sperber, D. and Wilson, D., 1982b: Reply to Clark. In: Smith (ed.).Sperber, D. and Wilson, D., 1982c: Reply to Gazdar and Good. In: Smith (ed.).Sperber, D. and Wilson, D., 1982d: Reply to Wilks. In: Smith (ed.).Sperber, D. and Wilson, D., 1986: Loose talk. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

1985-6:153-71.Travis, C. (ed.), 1986: Meaning and Interpretation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Werth, P. (ed.), 1981: Conversation and Discourse. Croom Helm, London.Wilks, Y., 1986: Relevance and beliefs. In: Myers, Brown and McGonigle (eds.).Wilson, D. and Sperber, D., 1979: Ordered entailments: an alternative to presuppositional

theories. In: Oh and Dinneen (eds.).Wilson, D. and Sperber, D., 1981: On Grice's theory of conversation. In: Werth (ed.).Wilson, D. and Sperber, D., 1986a: Inference and implicature. In: Travis.Wilson, D. and Sperber, D., 1986b: Pragmatics and modularity. Chicago Linguistic Society

Parassession on Grammar and Pragmatics.Wilson, D. and Sperber, D., (forthcoming): Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentence*.

To appear in: Dancy, Moravcsik and Taylor (eds.).

the self-appointment of seuren as censor a reply to pieter seuren

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