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.