Relevance in Mind

When relevance theory tried to express the underlying processes involved during interpretation, Sperber and Wilson posited a process of context elaboration in which interpretation is seen as a path of least effort leading to the selection of a set of most salient contextual assumptions and implications. In this view, contextual assumptions are not randomly scattered in the hearer's cognitive environment during this context elaboration process. Instead, Relevance Theory claims that there are some organizing principles ordering contextual assumptions and determining which assumptions will be more likely to be accessed first in the process. The focus of this paper is on one such organizing principle captured by the notion of strength. Sperber and Wilson define it as the degree of confidence with which an assumption is held. While this notion has been posited right from the early days of Relevance theory, it has been left relatively untouched in relevance-theoretic accounts. In this paper, we will assess the explanatory potential of the notion of strength by linking it to the much-debated range of phenomena understood as related to commitment, i.e., the degree of speaker involvement in the truth of their utterance. Our goal will be to argue for a theoretical account of strength, in which strength is regarded as a cognitive marker of commitment, and more generally of the epistemic value of an utterance. In order to support this claim, we will present a series of original experimental designs in which we manipulated the level of speaker commitment in the information conveyed by their utterance. We predicted, on the basis of the theoretical model put forward, that such a manipulation would impact the level of strength. This cognitive effect, it is claimed, can in turn be measured through a recall task. We present results which support this model and discuss its implications.

People often deny having meant what the audience understood. Such denials occur in both interpersonal and institutional contexts, such as in political discourse, the interpretation of laws and the perception of lies. In practice, denials have a wide range of possible effects on the audience, such as conversational repair, reinterpretation of the original utterance, moral judgements about the speaker, and rejection of the denial. When are these different reactions triggered? What factors make denials credible? There are surprisingly few experimental studies directly targeting such questions. Here, we present two pre-registered experiments focusing on (i) the speaker’s incentives to mislead their audience, and (ii) the impact of speaker denials on audiences’ moral and epistemic assessments of what has been said. We find that the extent to which speakers are judged responsible for the audience’s interpretations is modulated by their (the speakers’) incentives to mislead, but not by denials themselves. We also find that people are more willing than we expected to revise their interpretation of the speaker’s utterance when they learn that the ascribed meaning is false, regardless of whether the speaker is known to have had incentives to deceive their audience. In general, these findings are consistent with the idea that communicators are held responsible for the cognitive effects they trigger in their audience; rather than being responsible for, more narrowly, only the effects of what was “literally” said. In light of our findings, we present a new, cognitive analysis of how audiences react to denials, drawing in particular on the Relevance Theory approach to communication. We distinguish in particular: (a) the spontaneous and intuitive re-interpretation of the original utterance in light of a denial; (b) the attribution of responsibility to the speaker for the cognitive effects of what is communicated; and (c) the reflective attribution of a particular intention to the speaker, which include argumentative considerations, higher-order deniability, and reputational concerns. Existing experimental work, including our own, aims mostly at (a) and (b), and does not adequately control for (c). Deeper understanding of what can be credibly denied will be hindered unless and until this methodological problem is resolved.