‘Positive Hermeneutics’: Relevance and Communication

What is it about?

Relevance theory argues that communication is successful not when hearers recognise an utterance’s linguistic meaning, but when they infer the speaker’s meaning from it. By extension, for literary communication to take place, a text must be inferentially combined with optimally relevant contextual assumptions – which are those envisaged by the writer. In this aspect at least, relevance theory clearly has many precursors, most notably the ‘romantic’ hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, which assumes that it is possible for a reader to transpose himself into an author’s linguistic context and to duplicate his mental and emotional state. However, as I show in this chapter, unlike the German hermeneutic tradition, and twentieth century critics such as Poulet and Richards who equally posit the possibility of a reader recreating an author’s thoughts or experience, relevance theory only presupposes the possibility of creating a partially mutual cognitive environment. After all, as the ‘radical historicist’ Gadamer suggests, no interpreter can ever simply abandon his own horizon, so that the best that can be hoped for is a fusion of the interpreter’s and author’s horizons or contexts. I also consider Dan Sperber’s account of the ‘epidemiology of representations’, which suggests that unlike, say, genes or viruses, mental representations tend to be transformed rather than replicated each time they are transmitted.

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