Cognitations EP #18 | Relevance & Communication | Dan Sperber
Nov 28, 2025
Dan Sperber, French cognitive anthropologist and philosopher who co-developed relevance theory, explains how communication elicits expectations that guide attention and interpretation. He challenges encoding-decoding models and explores pragmatics, ostension, attention costs, epistemic vigilance, and why certain signals spread across cultures. Short, sharp takes on why we find some messages irresistible.
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Language Is Underconstrained
- Utterances rarely fully encode speaker meaning and are often underdetermined by literal semantics.
- Listeners infer intended content by using context and expectations, not by decoding a perfect code.
Limits Of Gricean Models
- Grice's cooperative maxims explain implicatures but lack mechanistic cognitive detail.
- Rational Speech Act models formalize this but may be cognitively costly and unrealistic.
Communication Exploits Relevance
- Relevance theory says cognition prioritizes inputs that maximize cognitive effects for minimal effort.
- Communicators elicit an expectation of relevance to guide listeners' attention and interpretation.