Relevance, Cooperation and Intention. Counterpoint to Sperber and Wilson’s linguistic and communicative perspective

Abstract

The  principle  of  relevance  of  Sperber  and  Wilson  (1995)  underestimates the role of cooperation, and the theory’s inclination toward an individual intentionality is problematic. These are two of the critical observations that this paper introduces and discusses. Through a constant counterpoint with the aforementioned authors, the core arguments of their theory are analyzed in each section of this paper. The discussion will allow us to observe why it is necessary to include the notions of cooperation and collective intention in the explanation of the relevance theory, and at the same time, the con-cept of trust. Finally, it is also important to stress the distinction between the informative and argumentative conversational modes to achieve a full understanding of relevance.