Context selection and relevance

Abstract

Relevance Theory (Sperber &Wilson 1986, 1995) has been widely accepted as one of the most comprehensive frameworks in pragmatics. However, as in the case of most theories, it has faced criticism on several occasions. On one of them, Chiappe & Kukla (1996) argued against the relevance-theoretic framework on the grounds that it provides no solution to the Fodorian view of the Frame Problem (Fodor 1987) and accused Sperber & Wilson of disregarding the essential issue of context selection in communication. Sperber & Wilson's response to Chiappe & Kukla (1996) was that Relevance does not provide a solution to this problem because it does not need to do so: in their view, Fodor was wrong to formulate the frame problem in the first place. In this paper, I revise this view and present an argumentation against the Fodorian thesis on the matter. I suggest that his idea on the irrationality of the human cognitive system when it comes to context selection was rightly formulated in the first place; yet, Relevance Theory can help address this problem and account for a “rational” pattern of context selection, both with a view to general cognitive processing and in terms of utterance interpretation.