Relevance Theory as It Relates to Explicit and Implicit Communication - Essay Example

Client Relevance Theory as it Relates to Explicit and Implicit Communication Relevancetheory can help to resolve issues that surround determining the difference between explicit and implicit communication. Having a basis in pragmatism and stemming from the theories of Paul Grice, Relevance theory discusses the comparisons and conclusions one makes upon hearing information. It is the process by which information is correlated to known ideas. Relevance theory can be associated with perception and how the world is interpreted, revealing the natural balances of how existence is individually defined by experience. The interpretations of a communication is directly relevant to the experiences that define the codes used during the communication. Relevance theory poses the questions that surround interpretation of information and gives distinction of explicit and implicit communication In a discussion of Relevance Theory, one must first identify the difference between implicit and explicit communications. Explicit communication can be defined by the study of the obvious. In looking at language based on the way in which information is conveyed, the rules of the language and what signs and symbols comprise the language becomes the basis of the explicit communication. The basic rules on which those signs and symbols are interpreted is also part of explicit communication. Implicit 1 Client’s Last Name 2 communication is based on the idea of inference. The way in which the structure of the communication implies further information based on what the listener knows becomes what is implicit. The second issue that should be addressed are the foundational approaches on pragmatism proposed and generally accepted by Paul Grice. “The first is that sentence meaning is a vehicle for conveying a speaker’s meaning, and that a speaker’s meaning is an overtly expressed intention which is fulfilled by being recognized.” Wilson and Sperber define this by saying that “On the inferential view, utterances are not signals but pieces of evidence about the speakers meaning, and comprehension is achieved by inferring this meaning from evidence provided not only by the utterance but also by the context.” [1]. In this proposal, language is only a piece of the communication process. Language is a source of minimal expression that is the core of much larger interpretations. The second foundational argument made by Grice is that “in inferring the speaker’s meaning, the hearer is guided by the expectation that utterances should meet some specific standards” [2]. Wilson & Sperber say that “conversation is a rational, cooperative activity. In formulating their utterances, speakers are expected to follow a Cooperative Principle, backed by maxims of Quantity (informativeness), Quality (truthfulness), Relation (relevance) and Manner (clarity) which are such that “in 1. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2004. Pragmatics. Found in Jackson, Frank, and Michael Smith. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy. Oxford handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 469-470. 2. Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, as quoted by Wilson & Sperber 2004, 470. 2 Client’s Last Name 3 paradigmatic cases, their observance promotes and their violation dispromotes conversational rationality” [3] The following shows this concept defined: Cooperative Principle (Grice 1967/1989: 26-27) Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. Quantity maxims 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Quality maxims Supermaxim: Try to make your contribution one that is true. 1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Maxim of Relation Be relevant. Manner maxims Supermaxim: Be perspicuous 1. Avoid obscurity of expression. 2 Avoid ambiguity. 3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). 4. Be orderly. [4] Within the proposal and the maxims by Grice are a spirit of economy in regards to language. The words expressed are to give enough information to convey the message, but not over explain in an analysis of the message being conveyed. In examining unsuccessful communication, these maxims become more clear. When speaking with someone who is less socialized, the awkward silence, or tendency to over explain, can be 3. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2004,470. 4. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2004,470-471. 3 Client’s Last Name 4 an example of how these maxims are not fulfilled, and reaffirm the impact of their intent. Relevance theory argues that what is interpreted by the listener will be concluded based on information that is relevant to what has been communicated. Wilson and Sperber say that “Relevance theory starts from a detailed account of relevance and its role in cognition. Relevance is defined as a property of inputs to cognitive processes (whether external stimuli, which can be perceived and attended to, or internal representations, which can be stored, recalled, or used as premises in inference). An input is relevant to an individual when it connects with available contextual assumptions to yield positive cognitive effects“[5]. Relevance is however one gathers the optimum amount of new information by whatever method has the least effort involved in gathering that information. Relevance theory is derived from the philosophy of thought developed as pragmatism. This school of thought is concerned with the interpretation of truth and what is most practical. The gathering of information is deemed necessary in determining conclusions about how the world is interpreted. That interpretation becomes the basis of truth. Relevance theory defines those interpretations as they are based on what is known and believed by the one receiving the information who then creates conclusions based on a series of inferences made by that knowledge. In exploring this sense of reality and what is the definition of truth, the personal way in which these interpretations are experienced is relevant. As information is made available to the individual, by whatever means it is created, it is then interpreted based on 5. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2004, 473. 4 Client’s Last Name 5 prior knowledge and processed by what has been implied. Paul Grice’s work makes the distinction between what is said and what is implicated by what is said. This gives a great deal of support for the differences between explicit and implicit communications. As well, according to Robyn Carston, this also creates the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Carston says, “what is said’ is equated with the truth-conditional content of the utterance which in turn is equated with (context-relative) sentence meaning, leaving implicatures (conventional and conversational) as the sole domain of pragmatics.”[6] Semantics deals with the literal meaning that is conferred in conversation. If one takes the sentence, ’Lilly bit into the apple.’ one, from the standpoint of literal interpretation believes, that Lilly has bitten into a piece of fruit defined as an apple. From the standpoint of pragmatism, and when presented in another context, such as an apple being the metaphor for New York City, how this sentence is interpreted becomes relevant to what has been implied by previous information. If the sentence is found in a paragraph, such as the following example, Lilly set out on her own to discover the world. She found herself in New York, living a dream that many aspire to obtain, but few actually get to experience. She made her way to the stages of Broadway, creating a splash for the critics, and displaying a talent like no other. She dined and danced at all the best parties and met all the most sensational people. Her experiences were legendary and the headlines in her obituary would read, ’Lilly bit into the apple’ with great exuberance. The relevant context of the statement takes on new meaning when associated with 6. R. Carston. Relevance theory and the saying/implicating distinction. Found in Horn, Laurence R., and Gregory L. Ward. The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. , 633. 5 Client’s Last Name 6 references of pop culture that, from previous knowledge, allows for the correlation between the ‘apple’ and ‘New York City’. The interpretation of a statement is made by the imputing and processing of codes that are commonly known between two participants. This, of course, is the basis of language. However, there is a distinct difference between the strict literal translation of the code and the inferential translation. Dierdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, in their paper, Relevance Theory, outline these differences in reverence to Grice’s foundations of the inferential code. They say: According to the code (classic)model, a communicator encodes her intended message into a signal, which is decoded by the audience using an identical copy of the code. According to the inferential model, a communicator provides evidence of her intention to convey a certain meaning. Which is inferred by the audience on the basis of the evidence provided. An utterance is, of course, a linguistically coded piece of evidence, so that verbal comprehension involves an element of decoding. However, the linguistic meaning recovered by decoding is just one of the inputs to a non-demonstrative inference process which yields an interpretation of the speaker’s meaning.[7]. In the context of this definition, communication is subjective in its interpretation. In the classic code model, information is interpreted by one theory of its interpretation. When a statement is made, it is interpreted by strict standards of interpretation. In the inferential model, the statement has subjectivity, and is interpreted by the information provided by the speaker as interpreted by the knowledge of the audience. This leads to the understanding that relevance is determined by comparative 7. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2004. Relevance theory. Found in Horn, Laurence R., and Gregory L. Ward. The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, 607. 6 Client’s Last Name 7 interpretation rather than quantitative. If code was interpreted by quantitative methods, it could be measured and translated according to conforming and consistent ideals. The concept of the explicit requires that information have the same interpretation from one individual to the next individual as they receive the communication. However, in the essence of comparative interpretation, information that is not understood as implied, is relevant to the way in which that information is processed. It is the hope of shared previous knowledge and agreed upon reference interpretation that leads to successful communication between two people. For instance, if one person states to another that ‘We are having fish.’, the mind will infer the most common interpretation of that statement available. The person speaking may know that the fish intended to be prepared is tilapia, while the person receiving the information most often serves cod and interprets that information as a different dish than intended. The receiver is comparing his or her own experiences with serving fish to the statement and drawing conclusions based on those calculations. According to Wilson and Sperber, “Relevance theory claims that humans do have an automatic tendency to maximize relevance, not because we have a choice in the matter - we rarely do - but because of the way our cognitive systems have evolved.” Humans will most often process information along the shortest path to a conclusion, without contradictory information. Wilson and Sperber go on to say, “the human cognitive system has developed in such a way that our perceptual mechanisms tend automatically to pick out potentially relevant stimuli, our memory retrieval mechanisms tend 7 Client’s Last Name 8 Automatically to activate potentially relevant assumptions, and our inferential mechanisms tend spontaneously to process them in the most productive way.” [8]. It is an automatic response to quickly sift through all the relevant information and come to conclusions that are subjective and personally influenced. As one examines the explicit, the implied and the implicit, the association to relevance theory becomes inextricable. As explicit has been defined, it is a literal interpretation of a communication, without interpretation being necessary. This is actually a very difficult premise to accomplish. Wilson and Sperber propose that “what is explicitly communicated by an utterance typically goes well beyond what is said or literally meant, and may be vaguer and less determinate than is generally assumed”[9]. The most simplistic versions of statements that are made, must usually have interpretation by comparison associated with them. In the example provided by Bach, in Conversational implicature, the statement ‘I’ve eaten breakfast.’ must use a series of deductions to conclude its intent. When the statement is made, by knowing the circumstances that led to the statement, it is then decided that the statement has implicated that breakfast was consumed today. However, it may be implied that breakfast would not be necessary again.[10] Bach maintains that there is a distinct difference between implied and the implicit. In this working of definitions, it allows for the relative absence of the explicit in the ability to use it in actuality in communications. 8. Wilson & Sperber, 2004, 611. 9. Wilson & Sperber, 2004, 611. 10. K. Bach. Conversational implicature. Mind & Language 9 : 1994, 124-162. Available at http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/impliciture.htm 8 Client’s Last Name 9 The differences of explicit and implicit are lined up by Grice in a row of semantics tenants versus pragmatist principles. Semantics Pragmatics What is said What is implied Explicit Implicit Linguistically en(de)coded Not linguistically en(de)coded (inferred) Context free Context sensitive Truth-conditional(entailment) Non-truth-conditional(non-deductive) [11] In the process of defining these distinctions, it appears that they can be determined by measurable ideals. However, this is not the case. The definitions of explicit indicate that no other communication but the exact literal communication would be necessary to distribute a piece of information. This would lead to very long and complicated sentence structures. To be explicit, is to be precise. One might look at the military when determining the difficulty of explicit communication. In the military, it is imperative that instructions and orders be followed without re-interpretation by the soldiers. When an order is given, it is expected that it will be followed without any further explanation nor any questions from the soldier. However, the explicit nature of the order is relevant to the instruction that has been given previously in regard to the nature of an order. Under this definition, it is not explicit. For 11. N. Burton-Roberts. 2005 ‘Robyn Carston on semantics, pragmatics and encoding.’ Journal of Linguistics 41:389-407. Review article of Carston 2002. Retrieved 12 January from http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/research/papers/Review%20of%20Carston%202002.pdf 9 Client’s Last Name 10 a person in the military to hear a particular order would be different from the order if heard by a non-military personal. The instruction given in training to the soldier is relevant to how he or she understands the order. On this, Carston quotes Foder when it is said that, “English has no semantics. Learning English isn’t learning a theory about what its sentences mean, it’s learning how to associate its sentences with the corresponding thoughts.” Foder defines thoughts as having semantics that are the references to the implications of communication. “It is the language of thought that has a referential semantics, and that semantics gives the contents of our propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, intentions, etc): natural language sentences, can, at most, be thought of as inheriting this semantics from the beliefs, desires, etc. that it is used to express.” [12] In this concept, it is thought, rather than language that has an explicit nature. In an argument against Relevance theory, Noel Burton-Roberts says “I suggest RT(Relevance theory) attributes either too little or too much in the way of semantics to particular languages. It is too little to be consistent with the traditional assumption that particular languages have semantics as ordinarily understood, and too much to be consistent with LoT being the sole locus of real semantic properties.” [13]. It would appear that the issues of Relevance theory is that is puts too much emphasis on the implied and doesn’t truly allow the existence of the explicit by virtue of words. 12. Robyn Carston, 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Pub, 2002, 5 13. Noel Burton-Roberts. 2005 ‘Robyn Carston on semantics, pragmatics and encoding.’ Journal of Linguistics 41:389-407. Review article of Carston 2002. 10 Client’s Last Name 11 This brings about the concept of ‘pragmatic presupposition’ and the concepts of ‘mutual knowledge’. This is the assumption, introduced by Grice, that both parties, the speaker and the audience, understands certain criteria that are used in communicating the ideas that are being expressed. Carson contends that there are two possibilities for the knowledge needed to interpret communication. She says that (a) the concept of what is said has to be understood as involving much more of a pragmatic contribution than Grice acknowledged, a contribution which is as much driven by conversational maxims or communicative principles as is the derivation of conversational implicatures.” , the Carson chooses to go to the next concept of (b) a very constrained, semantically-oriented concept of what is said can be maintained, but only at the cost of recognizing a further representational level, between what is said and what is implicated.”[14] The concepts that are presented through the interpretation of Relevance theory are concepts that divine the essence of communication. In order to determine the differences between the explicit and the implicit, it is necessary to determine how those two concepts relate to one another and how the relevance of what is implied affects the nature of what is explicit. In the instance of ‘Lilly bit into the apple”, the assumptions made by the speaker on the audience make how the explicit information relevant by the assumptions of ’mutual knowledge’ that support the implicit communication of the statement. In a context outside of the paragraph, the assumption is that the receiver of the information knows about apples. However, when this statement is put into another 14. Carston, 2006 11 Client’s Last Name 12 context, say in reference to a broken tooth, it is important that the receiver knows that an apple puts pressure on the teeth when it is bitten and could therefore be the cause of the broken tooth. In this way, the strength of the proposition is important for context. “A proposition may be more or less strongly implicated by an utterance.”, according to Wilson and Sperber. It is STRONGLY IMPLICATED if its recovery is essential in order to arrive at an interpretation that satisfies the expectations of relevance raised by the utterance itself. It is WEAKLY IMPLICATED if its recovery helps with the construction of an interpretation that is relevant in the expected way, but is not itself essential because the utterance suggests a range of similar implications, any of which would do.[15] The way in which the proposition is relevant to what is being communicated and in how important the knowledge that surrounds the information is to the communication itself, creates the strength and weakness of those implications. “On an extremely intuitive level, the more pragmatic implication an utterance has, the more relevant it is.”[16] As one balances the explicit inadequacies of what is spoken to the implicit nature of utterances, and then puts that into perspective with the difference in the explicit nature of thought as opposed to the implicit nature, it can be concluded that words are primarily implicit, and thoughts are primarily explicit. In this way, relevance theory defines, not only the difference between explicit and implicit communication, but, perhaps, associates them between speaker and receiver. 15. Wilson, & Sperber, 2004, 625. 16. D.Wilson, and Sperber, D. 1981. ‘On Grice’s theory of conversation’. Found in Werth, Paul. Conversation and discourse: structure and interpretation. London u.a: Croom Helm, 1985. 12 Client’s Last Name 13 In examining the ideas of existence and the inner and outer world, it can be determined that implicit information is gathered by the perception of experience and by the preexisting knowledge that is relevant to that information. Knowledge about the information that is imparted must be shared in order for the communication to be effective. As in the example of the ‘apple’, if one is not familiar with the nickname associated with New York, one will not understand the metaphor that has been created in association with the ‘apple’. In making the statement related to known information, the implicit information is received and made contextual. How the mind interprets relevant information is the essential component in successful communication. Relevance theory defines the understanding of implicit communication in order to understand explicit communication. 13 Client’s Last Name 14 Works Cited K. Bach. Conversational implicature. Mind & Language 9 : 1994, 124-162. Available at http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/impliciture.htm Burton-Roberts, N. 2005 ‘Robyn Carston on semantics, pragmatics and encoding.’ Journal of Linguistics 41:389-407. Review article of Carston 2002. Carston, Robyn. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Pub, 2002. Carston, Robyn. Relevance theory and the saying/implicating distinction. Found in Horn, Laurence R., and Gregory L. Ward. The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. , 633. Grice, H. Paul. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1989. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 1981. On Grice’s theory of conversation. Found in Werth, Paul. Conversation and discourse: structure and interpretation. London u.a: Croom Helm, 1985. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2004. Relevance theory. Found in Horn, Laurence R., and Gregory L. Ward. The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. . Client’s Last Name 15 Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2004. Pragmatics. Found in Jackson, Frank, and Michael Smith. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy. Oxford handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 15 Read More