From the Individual to the Social

This chapter focuses on social factors in cognition. There is a puzzle about the human capacity to reflect on our beliefs. As argued in Chapter 4, this capacity, when exercised privately, does not make our belief acquisition more reliable. If we assume, however, that this capacity was selected for by evolution, like other features of the human body and human mind, then the question arises as to what it was selected for. This chapter focuses on a hypothesis due to Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber: that our capacity to reflect was selected for its role in cooperative activity. The upshot of this hypothesis, if it should prove correct, is that reflection does indeed contribute to greater reliability in belief acquisition, but only when it is used in cooperative problem-solving rather than private reflection.

Proyecciones didácticas de la teoría argumentativa de la razón

El objetivo del artículo consiste en poner en diálogo tres líneas de investigación dentro de la epistemología contemporánea: la Epistemología de la Virtud, el paradigma de la Racionalidad Limitada y la Teoría Argumentativa de la Razón. Frente al problema que interesa analizar aquí, a saber, la búsqueda de un marco teórico que permita diseñar estrategias pedagógicas (tanto al interior de la enseñanza de la filosofía como fuera de ella) sobre premisas realistas, la Epistemología de la Virtud será presentada como una corriente marcadamente optimista desde el punto de vista epistémico. El paradigma de la Racionalidad Limitada representará la contrapartida de dicha corriente, en la medida en que parece conducir a un pesimismo marcado respecto de la posibilidad de diseñar estrategias que permitan perfeccionar las prácticas epistémicas de los sujetos. Frente a estos dos polos, se sugerirá que la Teoría Argumentativa de la Razón (desarrollada en la última década por Hugo Mercier y Dan Sperber) representa una alternativa prometedora por dos razones fundamentales: en primer lugar, porque ofrece una respuesta al problema (enfrentado por el paradigma de la Racionalidad Limitada) del carácter adaptativo de la razón humana desde un punto de vista evolutivo; en segundo lugar, porque permite superar el pesimismo epistémico esencial al paradigma de la Racionalidad Limitada al momento de planificar estrategias pedagógicas realistas y efectivas.

QUESTÕES SOBRE LINGUAGEM E COGNIÇÃO: ALGUMAS PERGUNTAS PARA DAN SPERBER

Entrevista com Dan Sperber supervisionada por Elena Godoy

A teoria das implicaturas de Grice sob a ótica dos teóricos da relevância

This article’s aim is to put under examination the Relevance Theory (presented by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in Relevance: communication and cognition) by the means of a comparison between this theory and Paul Grice’s inferential approach of communication. We believe that certain central claims of the Relevance Theory (for example, the statement of explicatures) could only be established on the theoretical basis built in works such “Meaning” and “Logic and conversation”. To highlight the similarities and differences between these models and to analyze their consequences for a cognitivist grounded theory of communication will be the task of this article.

Preliminaries

The central thesis of this book is that relevance theory, pioneered by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, can be developed into an all-encompassing theory for modeling communication, including its visual and multimodal mass-communicative varieties. The first chapter paves the way for this claim by discussing a series of studies from different disciplines that together paint a picture of the basic assumptions underlying communication. Ultimately relevance theory is rooted in the Darwinian drive to survive and to reproduce. Aspects of this are the crucial importance of intentionality; the close link between perception and cognition; the need for group members to cooperate to achieve shared goals; the connection between information and attitudes, emotions, and beliefs pertaining to that information; and agreement about what is “fair” behavior. To support these claims, key insights are discussed and summarized in studies of two psycholinguists (Gibbs 1999; Clark 1996), two film scholars (Bordwell 1989; Grodal 2009), two art historians (Gombrich 1999; Arnheim 1969), two scholars working on communication with apes (Tomasello 2008, 2019; De Waal 2009, 2016), and several humanities and social science scholars inspired by Darwin’s evolution theory (Boyd et al. 2010).

Relevance Theory

Relevance theory attempts to provide a psychologically realistic, explicit account of communication. It makes foundational claims about both cognition in general and utterances and how they are processed in particular. The former is the cognitive principle of relevance: cognition tends to seek maximal relevance, where an input to a cognitive process is more relevant the more positive effects it has on the mind’s representations of the world, and less relevant the greater the effort required to derive them. Although on this view we have a tendency to seek the greatest possible payoff for the least possible effort, there is no general guarantee that an input to a cognitive process will be relevant. However, communication is special. Speakers want to be understood, and they therefore tailor their utterances to their audience. Relevance theory claims that this raises a defeasible expectation that the utterance will be “optimally relevant”; that is, that it is both relevant enough to be worth processing and as relevant as the speaker is willing and able to make it. (This is the communicative principle of relevance.) It further claims that this mandates the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic: a fast and frugal procedure dedicated to processing utterances. Relevance theory claims that what a speaker communicates falls into two classes: explicatures, or propositions that are developments of the logical form of the sentence uttered, and other propositions conveyed, which are implicatures. A further fundamental assumption of relevance theory is that linguistically encoded meaning radically underdetermines the content that a speaker intends to convey. Much research has focused on investigating this linguistic underdetermination and on developing accounts of the interpretation of particular linguistic items and types of utterances. Specific areas of research include lexical pragmatics; figurative speech, including metaphor and irony; the interpretation of discourse connectives and linguistic items that have non-truth-conditional meaning; and the interpretation of logical linguistic items such as and, if . . . then, and negation. Turning briefly to the history of the field: relevance theory is grounded in the philosopher Paul Grice’s work on meaning and conversation, and the theoretical advances of the cognitive revolution in linguistics and psychology. It was initially developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in the late 1970s and 1980s, and has been one of the leading pragmatic theories since then. Both Sperber and Wilson continue to be active in developing the theory. Other key contributors include Diane Blakemore, who introduced the notion of procedural meaning, and Robyn Carston, who is best known for her work on the semantics/pragmatics interface and linguistic underdeterminacy. Relevance theory has contributed considerably to the emerging fields of experimental and developmental pragmatics, and it is in dialogue with philosophy of language.

París, California y la búsqueda por una teoría del cambio cultural

The debate on the possibility of an evolutionary theory of cultural change has heated up, over the last years, due to the supposed incompatibilities between the two main theoretical proposals in the field: dual inheritance theory and cultural epidemiology. The former, first formulated in the 1980’s by a group of biologists and anthropologists mostly hosted at Californian universities, supports an analogy between genetic inheritance and cultural transmission. Cultural epidemiology, more recently formulated by Dan Sperber and his collaborator (mostly hosted at Parisian universities), denies the defensibility of such an analogy and put forward a partially alternative model. But how much do these proposals actually differ with each other? In this article, I shall argue that less than what cultural epidemiologists use to think.

Sobre as funções e a materialidade linguística da ficção

Proposição da homeostase, conforme definida por António Damásio, como função dominante da ficção. Proposição do prazer na leitura como explicação do interesse pela literatura; explicação desse prazer como resultado da homeostase proporcionada pela leitura. Seguindo Damásio, compreenderemos a homeostase como um tipo de equilíbrio psíquico proporcionado pela experiência da arte, que permite, no decorrer da sua fruição, que indivíduos e coletividades processem problemas sociais ainda não propriamente interpretados e nomeados. Como esse equilíbrio não é apenas conscientemente processado, é preciso explicar como os componentes semânticos nele implicados podem se efetivar infraconscientemente; para tanto, recorremos aos conceitos de affordances e relevância. Inspirados pela apropriação de Terence Cave da proposição original de James J. Gibson, propomos que affordances textuais orientam o leitor na postura assumida diante do texto. Quanto à teoria da relevância de Dan Sperber e Deirdre Wilson, ela nos inspira a propor os modos pelos quais os conteúdos textuais produzem o equilíbrio homeostático proposto como função da ficção. Ao final, discutimos a extensão da nossa teorização e os possíveis limites à sua universalização.

Acquisition of Pragmatics

How do children learn to bridge the gap between the literal, semantic meaning of words and the intended, pragmatic meaning of an utterance? The acquisition of pragmatics is the topic of an experimental field of study that investigates this question. According to an influential pragmatic theory proposed by the philosopher Paul Grice, communication is a collaborative effort governed by specific rules (or “maxims”). A collaborative speaker is expected to be as informative as required by the purpose of the communicative exchange (maxim of Quantity), truthful (maxim of Quality), relevant (maxim of Relation), and unambiguous (maxim of Manner). A collaborative listener makes inferences about the speaker’s intentions based on the assumption that the speaker is being cooperative and following the conversational rules. Later pragmatic theories such as Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s relevance theory have offered important alternatives to the Gricean framework but share several foundational assumptions with Grice’s approach, including the idea that human communication involves representing the speaker’s beliefs and goals. Whether young children are capable of making such inferences about the speaker’s mental states and how aspects of this ability might develop are the most important questions in the study of children’s pragmatic development. For many years, it was believed that children before the age of five or six were not able to entertain pragmatic inferences about the speaker’s intentions or knowledge state. However, more recent theoretical advancements in the semantics-pragmatics interface and the development of new methodological tools have led to a reconsideration of older findings. It appears increasingly likely that the skills required for pragmatic reasoning are in place from a very young age, but the process of applying those skills in communication is effortful and highly task dependent, and continues to develop until late childhood. This article focuses on prominent work on the acquisition of children’s pragmatic abilities in three areas that have generated a considerable body of data: Reference, Implicature, and Figurative Language.