Relevance, 2nd Edition

‘This book … is very likely to become a classic, not only because of its potential implications for linguistics, cognitive psychology and anthropology, but because of the range and originality of the theory it proposes.’ – Pascal Engel, Revue Philosophique

‘Cognitive science is very often marred by demarcation disputes and protectionist attitudes which have little or no rational basis. Occasionally, however, it works as it should and a book appears which reaches across the bread and butter lines which institutional life forces upon us. Relevance is, I think, such a book.’ – Alan Leslie, Mind and Language.

‘The repercussions of Relevance are likely in the long run to be great – felt first, perhaps, in the pragmatics of conversation, the philosophy of language, and reader-response criticism, but also in many other activities: construction of memory models, pedagogy, machine learning and (doubtless) advertising and propaganda.’ – Alastair Fowler, London Review of Books

‘I recommend this book to people interested in linguistics, philosophy of language and pragmatics, and, definitely, to people who cultivate an interest in semiotics.’ – Umberto Eco, L’Expresso

‘This is probably the best book you’ll ever read on communication.’ – Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Dan Sperber of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, and the Université de Paris X, is author of Rethinking Symbolism and On Anthropological Knowledge.

Dierdre Wilson is Reader in Linguistics at University College London, and the author of Presuppositions and Non-Truth-Conditional Semantics and Modern Linguistics: The Results of Chomsky’s Revolution.

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