Relevance and emotion

Wharton, Tim; Bonard, Constant; Dukes, Daniel; Sander, David; Oswald, Steve

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2021.06.001

Cited by 30 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…14 I will now sketch the rationale for this principle. This can only be a tentative argument and more work would be required to sustain my claims but a detailed argumentation and an exploration of its consequences would require a paper of its own (Wharton et al, 2021 give arguments that support some of the following). Nevertheless, I hope that the following will suffice in indicating how the expressive principle of relevance may be derived from what we know about emotions together with the cognitive principle of relevance.…”

Section: Expressive Principle Of Relevancementioning

confidence: 94%

“…The main point here is that, for any kinds of stimuli other than ostensive stimuli, we cannot expect a stable guarantee of sufficient relevance. In light of other writings (especially Sperber and Wilson, 2002;Wilson and Sperber, 2006), this means that we can rationally expect that ostensive stimuli are relevant enough to be worth the effort necessary to make the RTCP work, but we shouldn't expect any other kinds of stimuli to possess a level of relevance that is always high enough. 6 We now have seen why relevance theorists may want to accept claim (b) 7…”

Section: Rtcp and Ostensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Beyond ostension: Introducing the expressive principle of relevance

Bonard¹

2022

Journal of Pragmatics

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Section: Expressive Principle Of Relevancementioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Rtcp and Ostensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond ostension: Introducing the expressive principle of relevance

Bonard¹

2022

Journal of Pragmatics

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“…5), is a root cause of many of the most distinctive aspects of human behaviour and societies. Other domains that have been studied from a perspective broadly similar to ours include divination (Boyer, 2020), humour (Yus, 2016), emotional expression (Dezecache, Mercier, & Scott-Phillips, 2013; Wharton, Bonard, Dukes, Sander, & Oswald, 2021), literary interpretation (Cave & Wilson, 2018; Chapman & Clark, 2019), mathematical diagrams (McCallum, 2019), onomatopoeia (Sasamoto, 2019), many borderline or quasi-linguistic phenomena (Ifantidou, de Saussure, & Wharton, 2021), and others.…”

Section: Diversity In Human Expressionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Expression unleashed: The evolutionary and cognitive foundations of human communication

Heintz

Scott‐Phillips²

2022

Behav Brain Sci

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Human expression is open-ended, versatile and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how they are unleashed in humans. The relevant cognitive capacities are cognitive adaptations to living in a partner choice social ecology; and they are, correspondingly, part of the ordinarily developing human cognitive phenotype, emerging early and reliably in ontogeny. In other words, we identify distinctive features of our species’ social ecology to explain how and why humans, and only humans, evolved the cognitive capacities that, in turn, lead to massive diversity and open-endedness in means and modes of expression. Language use is but one of these modes of expression, albeit one of manifestly high importance. We make cross-species comparisons, describe how the relevant cognitive capacities can evolve in a gradual manner, and survey how unleashed expression facilitates not only language use but novel behaviour in many other domains too, focusing on the examples of joint action, teaching, punishment and art, all of which are ubiquitous in human societies but relatively rare in other species. Much of this diversity derives from graded aspects of human expression, which can be used to satisfy informative intentions in creative and new ways. We aim to help reorient cognitive pragmatics, as a phenomenon that is not a supplement to linguistic communication and on the periphery of language science, but rather the foundation of the many of the most distinctive features of human behaviour, society and culture.

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“…5), is a root cause of many of the most distinctive aspects of human behaviour and societies. Other domains that have been studied from a perspective broadly similar to ours include divination (Boyer, 2020), humour (Yus, 2016), emotional expression (Dezecache, Mercier, & Scott-Phillips, 2013;Wharton, Bonard, Dukes, Sander, & Oswald, 2021), literary interpretation (Cave & Wilson, 2018;Chapman & Clark, 2019), mathematical diagrams (McCallum, 2019), onomatopoeia (Sasamoto, 2019), many borderline or quasi-linguistic phenomena (Ifantidou, de Saussure, & Wharton, 2021), and others.…”

Section: Diversity In Human Expressionmentioning

confidence: 95%

What semantic dementia tells us about the ability to infer others' communicative intentions

Federico¹

2023

Behav Brain Sci

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As Heintz & Scott-Phillips rightly argued, pragmatics has been too commonly considered as a supplement to linguistic communication. Their aim to reorient the study of cognitive pragmatics as the foundation of many distinctive features of human behavior finds echo in the neuropsychological literature on tool use, in which the investigation of semantic dementia challenges the classical semantics versus pragmatics dissociation.

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Relevance and emotion

Cited by 30 publications

References 32 publications

Beyond ostension: Introducing the expressive principle of relevance

Beyond ostension: Introducing the expressive principle of relevance

Expression unleashed: The evolutionary and cognitive foundations of human communication

What semantic dementia tells us about the ability to infer others' communicative intentions

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