Books

Short works

Books : reviews

Neil V. Smith, Deirdre Wilson.
Modern Linguistics: the results of Chomsky's revolution.
1979

Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson.
Relevance: communication and cognition.
Blackwell. 1986

This is one of those rare books that promises to alter the direction of research in a whole range of disciplines. Its importance is, firstly, that it lays the foundations for a unified theory of cognitive science. The authors argue that human cognition has a goal: we pay attention only to information which seems to us relevant. To communicate is to claim someone's attention, and hence to imply that the information communicated is relevant. A single property – relevance – is seen as the key to human communication and cognition.

Secondly, the book achieves a breakthrough in the study of reasoning. It elucidates the role of background or contextual information in spontaneous inference, and offers an analysis of non-demonstrative inference processes. It directly challenges recent claims that human central thought processes are likely to remain a mystery for some time to come.

Thirdly, the authors offer new insight into language and literature, radically revising current views on the nature and goals of verbal comprehension, and in particular on metaphor, irony, style, speech acts, presupposition and implicature. Sperber and Wilson’s writings on relevance theory are already influencing work in a wide variety of fields, including artificial intelligence and computer science.