2008-2009 Templeton Research Lectures
Culture and Religion in a Naturalistic Perspective

Lecture 3: Relevance in cognition, communication and culture

Abstract:

At any given moment, there is much to be perceived in our environment and even much more to be remembered from our past experiences. Most of this information is not presently relevant, and, in fact, we ignore it. Human cognition is geared towards relevance, that is, towards attending to the most relevant inputs and toward processing these inputs in the context that best brings out this relevance.

The fact that relevance guides our cognitive processes makes it to some extent possible to follow and to predict the thought processes of others. This in turn makes it possible to try and influence them covertly or overtly. When we communicate, we try to influence our audience overtly. In so doing, we imply that our message is relevant enough to be worth their attention. As Deirdre Wilson and I have argued, every communicative act conveys a presumption of its own relevance. This presumption of relevance is what makes it possible to understand unequivocally what a speaker means even if the linguistic meaning of the sentence she utters is multiply ambiguous and compatible with a wide variety of interpretations.

The role that relevance plays in individual cognition and inter-individual communication extends, at a societal level, to culture. At every step in its transmission, cultural information must be relevant enough to be processed and properly comprehended. Otherwise it is forgotten, or it is transformed towards greater relevance.

The lecture explores the ways in which relevance guides human cognition, communication, and culture