Relevance Theory

Relevance Theory was developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their groundbreaking work Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986, second edition 1995). It offers an alternative to Grice's Cooperative Principle and represents one of the most influential developments in pragmatics since Grice. For AQA A-Level, understanding Relevance Theory provides an additional analytical framework and demonstrates awareness of the theoretical debate within pragmatics.

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The Problem with Grice

While Grice's framework is powerful, Sperber and Wilson identified several problems with it:

1. The maxim of Relation is underdeveloped. Grice simply says "be relevant" without explaining what relevance is, how it is assessed, or why it matters more than the other maxims.
2. The maxims overlap and are sometimes redundant. It is not always clear whether a particular feature of communication should be explained by Quantity, Quality, Relation, or Manner.
3. The Cooperative Principle is too strong. Not all communication is cooperative in Grice's sense.

Sperber and Wilson's response was radical: they argued that relevance alone can explain everything that Grice's four maxims were designed to explain. Their theory replaces the four maxims with a single principle: the Principle of Relevance.

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What Is Relevance?