The Principle of Relevance in the Light of Cooperation and Trust Discussing Sperber and Wilsons Theory1

Cristin Santibez Centre for the Study of Argumentation and Reasoning Faculty of Psychology Diego Portales University Chile

Abstract The principle of relevance of Sperber and Wilson (1995) underestimates the role of cooperation, and the theorys 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 concept 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.

Keywords: cooperation, evolution, intentionality, principle of relevance, trust.

1. Introduction If I began by saying that every contribution to the present issue of this journal is irrelevant, I would have not only stated something that is patently false, displayed bad manners, and chosen a poor rhetorical strategy to begin a paper, but I also would have applied the notion of relevance in an odd sense by using an utterance that is self-refuting and an evident deviation from my pragmatic competence. This paper deals precisely with the issues of us having a natural sense of what is relevant in everyday and specialized communication, on what grounds we can speak of a principle of relevance, and how this mechanism belongs to and relates to a larger system of cognition. To begin answering these important questions, the paper will focus on what is considered to be one of the most complete approaches regarding the definition and explanation of the concept of relevance. In Relevance: Communication and cognition (1995, 2nd edition), Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson propose a perspective on relevance that has led to empirical research on the phenomenon and has contributed to the development of pragmatic explanations of language. To what extent, however, is the principle of relevance outlined by these authors based on evidence? Is the principle indeed connected with linguistic and communicative competence, as claimed, for example, by scholars working on linguistic evolution? To address the issues and problems raised, I will put the problem of relevance into perspective in the following sections (2.1 and 2.2, respectively) by relating it to the phenomenon of cooperation in human communication from an evolutionary angle, specifically, in light of the thesis
1

This article is the product of my postdoctoral research entitled Principle of Relevance: Cognitive and argumentative dimensions (Project No. 3090017, National Commission of Science, Chile). I would like to thank Constanza Ihnen for helping me with the translation of my ideas from Spanish into English. The main corrections of my English of the first version were done by my wife Rebekka Bremmer. As always, I am indebted to her. The final version was revised by my colleague and friend Harvey Siegel.

of social and group motivation, and by analyzing the role of trust in the construction of relevance. In section 3.1, I will address the problem of intentionality as an essential component in Sperber and Wilsons approach to relevance, and then in section 3.2 I will discuss the problem of relevance in view of the notion of collective intentionality. In section 4, I shall discuss some of the specifications to the concept of relevance that Sperber and Wilson (1995) added in the epilogue to the second edition of Relevance, and argue that, rather than offering new elements, they persist in an overestimated modular perspective. In the conclusion (section 5), I propose a distinction that could help understand the problem of relevance, namely, the distinction between conversational informational and conversational argumentative types or modes. The distinction is important not only because of the way in which linguistic competence is expressed in each of these types, but also because the argumentative dimension recently has been addressed by Dan Sperber.

2. Cooperation and trust 2.1. Cooperation According to Maynard-Smith and Harper (2003), many biologists believe that, in the biological world, communication need not be intentional or cooperative because communication is defined, in the biological context, as any stimulus produced by an organism affecting the behavior of another organism. However, this thesis has been challenged by Tomasello (1999, 2008), for whom the idea of an unqualified biological continuity is inaccurate, because it does not take into consideration shared intentional communication, nor the processes of alarm-call that can be observed in the communication of several mammalian species. In an ecological environment with permanent alarmcalls where there is sensitivity to the attentional state of the messages recipient, as in the case of primates and humans, frequent interaction fosters stable cooperation. This happens despite the fact that primates, and often humans too, are unaware or do not look for causal relations that lie at the basis of stable cooperation. In a context of frequent interaction and stable cooperation between members who perceive themselves as cooperative, the development of conceptual common ground is facilitated (Clarke, 1996). Conceptual common ground is the social foundation that holds the individuals of a social group together, as it enables the elimination or reduction of unnecessary confrontations, the conventionalization of expectations, the management and resolution of differences, and the delimitation of conflicts. It is precisely in this evolutionary framework of the human species that the domain of shared intentionality has flourished as something unique (Tomasello 2008; Tomasello et al. 2010) What is the link between this cooperative behavior and the idea, concept or principle of relevance? Initially, it was a philosophical intuition (Grice, 1998) that linked cooperation, as rational behavior, with relevance, as a communicative and conversational orientation or maxim. Today, this philosophical intuition is supported by evolutionary studies. Tomasello (2008; see also, Boesch, 2005; Boesch and Boesch-Achermann, 2000; Call et al., 2004; Gmez, 2004; Hirata and Fuwa, 2006), for example, has devoted twenty years to the observation of primates and human infants between zero and three years old, and he has concluded that what we considered to be rational cooperative behavior is, in fact, the result of a merging of non-codified (i.e. pre-linguistic) communication and the structuring of mental and social intentionality in terms of communal life.2 Against this backdrop, relevance simply means context. Why are we able to communicate in a way as complex as the cooperative form? Because it became advantageous to hominids, in particular to humans, to divide and distribute labour within the framework of joint attention. It would have been disastrous for us if every time we had to communicate we had to explain all of our referential and
2

Other phenomena related to the role of cooperation in evolution in particular, in the evolution of language such as empathy, reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and reciprocity, to name only a few, cannot be discussed here, but are often included in the explanation of linguistic cooperative behaviour (Desalles, 2007; Hurford, 2007, 2012).

social intentions. Hence, from this perspective, relevant behavior is permanently an empathetic behavior that goes beyond the self-centered perspective of individuals and their subjectivities. In fact, as Tomasello (2008: 77) rightly points out, In direct competition, shared common ground trumps individual personal relevance every time. Relevant behavior filters and deepens the common ground for the purpose of constant and economic understanding; relevant behavior is what mobilizes joint action. This is the reason why, for example, the first social value we teach our children is not how to recognize differences, or to distrust their fellow human beings. On the contrary, we teach them to be cooperative; to understand social intentions and what is presumed in the linguistic and communicative exchange. In our attempt to teach communicative assumptions and implications, we do not hesitate to instill in our children all kind of tricks to talk little and say much, be it with the eyes, suggestive gestures or vocalizations. All this is only possible, however, if the child has first learned to recognize the attentional sensitivity of her peers, to share and manage the common ground that unites her to her counterpart. Is there anything that can determine relevance more directly? The answer given by Sperber and Wilson (Wilson, 1995, 1996, 2002; Wilson and Sperber, 2004), and especially Sperber (1994, 2001a, 2005), who are regarded as the creators of the most complete account of the notion of relevance, relates to the hypothesis of the modularity of mind. It is the modular structure and the information encapsulated in each module which serves as a network enabling the flow of relevance. The modularity of the mind, which can become increasingly more complex (over time, new conceptual modules are created by virtue of the flexibility of cognitive systems) is coordinated through a device which Sperber (2005) refers to as attentional. In Sperbers approach, which integrates Fodors (1983, 2001), there is an inferential relationship between the modules on the basis of the inputs sent. In this context, the device organizes the information based on the relevance of such inputs in order to ensure an optimal result, a process which Sperber calls cognitive efficiency. Thus, relevance is a property applying to inputs in cognitive processes. Relevance, from this point of view, is at the service of a modularly built mind that needs to be very flexible and sensitive to the context in order to survive. This input property of the cognitive processes involved in human communication, particularly in linguistic communication, treats or processes the stimulus by means of a device that is characteristically ostensive and inferential.

2.2. Trust There is, however, another way of answering the question as to whether there is something that determines relevance more specifically. In my view, the level of trust among participants in a dialogue significantly determines the relevance of a given communicative behavior, because when trust between actors is in question, the mechanism referred to as relevance does not work or, at least, loses its vitality. To this Sperber and Wilson (1995: 121) would answer that if the context of the dialogue is one of distrust, in which irrelevant statements are constantly used, then these irrelevant contents would become a highly relevant fact, because the behavior itself would express the state of distrust that one wants to communicate. Thus, even in such a context of distrust, the strength of the presumption of the (relevance of the) communicative act would prevail (Sperber and Wilson, 1987). The problem with this position is that it is proposed as an ad hoc thesis for any form of communication; after all, any strategy of clarification can become relevant at a second or third meta-communicative level. In addition, reality displays situations which question the authors explanation: we point out, accuse, and resist irrelevance in different ways. Actually, as Sperber and Wilson (1995: 160-161) pointed out when seeking to answer the question of what quantity of relevance a speaker must communicate to deserve the addressees attention, factors such as time, the specific occasion, the recipients wittiness, and the cultural circumstances and context, can limit the interpretation of the

ostensive stimulus, while distrust, Sperber and Wilson propose, is the borderline case in which this interpretation is completely obstructed.3 It is worth noting that, as Hurford (2007: 325) points out, linguistic behavior is typically an act of trust itself. As speakers, each of us trusts that the listener will not use what we say against us. The act of trusting by one party is an inference of trust for the other. How does confidence emerge? Membership in a group, family resemblance, and human hormonal functioning (oxytocin), develop the basic trust that pre-exists linguistic behavior and, by extension, specific mechanisms of this behavior, such as relevance. With varying degrees of conviction, in linguistic pragmatics (Leech, 1983; Huang, 2007) it is assumed that human communication is based on cooperative behavior, particularly on what Grice (1989) described as the cooperative principle. Even in the kind of communication where the speaker deliberatively deceives, the speaker cooperates by using a code the listener understands. At least momentarily, during the production and transfer of the misleading message, speaker and listener engage in the same game. These types of games, however, are not the norm in human communication. If we were trapped in games of deceptive communication, effective exchanges would be impossible, and evidence appears to suggest the contrary. Cooperation, in contrast, for example, to altruism, benefits all actors involved in the exchange. The thesis of trust as a precondition for cooperation is neither novel nor too risky. Raimo Tuomela (2010; Tuomela and Tuomela, 2005) is used as a source by several communication psychologists (e.g. Tomasello) and philosophers of language and the social (e.g. Searle, 1995; 2010). Regarding the role of trust in cooperation, Tuomela and Tuomela (2005: 71) state:
Our first thesis in this section is that, at least on conceptual and rational grounds, some kind of trust is needed for rationally initiating and maintaining intentional (I-mode or we-mode) cooperative action between conditional cooperators. Rational people do not enter into cooperative action with partners that are likely to refrain from doing their share. A central problem is that a participant might not know that the others will cooperate. Systems of control and sanctions are costly but yet they do not always have a deterring effect on free riders. There may be loopholes and even when cheaters get to pay for their breaches there will be lost resources when the cooperative action is harmed. The existence of codes of honour is helpful, but only if it is known that your partners adhere to them. An inner commitment to fair play may be based on various motives, one of them being the (collective and individual) advantage resulting from cooperation. However, we cannot be sure about the inner commitment of others nor of their other motives, e.g., of how important the gain of cooperation is for another person. When knowledge is lacking, trust is needed for cooperation.

How to link the exercise of trust in cooperative relationships with the idea of relevance which is, according to Sperber and Wilson, the subject of cognition or a property of cognitive systems? One possible answer is this: our cognitive skills and properties are products of a species that essentially evolved as a social species, and whose prime evolutionary achievement was the creation of a common ground. The common ground includes everything the members of a group know from world facts, through the way people act in certain situations, to what members of the group consider of interest and importance. This knowledge is necessary for the recipient of communication to determine both the referential intention and the social intention of the person who communicates. At some point in the human evolutionary process, selection made available collaborative and noncompetitive activities to part of the population. That moment must have been based on relations of
3

Sperber and Wilson (1995: 159) note that, even though uncommon in communication, obstructionists as exemplified by certain interventions in the British Parliament make strategic use of all kinds of marks of discourse that are apparently relevant, but they actually have no intention to achieve optimal relevance. I believe that Sperber and Wilsons perspective is problematic in this respect. Obstruction is more common than is commonly believed, especially with regards to public communication (political, economic, etc). In public communication, interactants often calculate which aspects of their message will be seen as relevant with a view to postpone decisions, delay results, invalidate the opponent, and misrepresent the opposing view, among other more or less conscious objectives. What ensures the stability and continuity of the objects in the world is the institutional basis that underlies such interactions. It could even be claimed that filibustering is a temporary game that is only possible when there is confidence that institutions work, despite delete of these irrelevant and uncooperative behaviours.

trust and tolerance in order to generate both role reversal and a beneficial mutualism. Only in this context did our cognitive achievements come into being. Sperber and Wilson (1995: 267) argue that relevance is a property of inputs in cognitive processes, reflected in the communicative behavior of individuals, and which does not require the disposition or condition of cooperation. However, a substantial part of individuals communicative behavior is linguistic and language is the product of a cooperative activity. As rightly pointed out by Tomasello (1999) regarding language acquisition, to acquire the conventional use of a linguistic symbol, infants must be able to determine the communicative intent of their adult peers and then engage in imitation role reversal, in which the infant will later use the symbol in the same way and in the same communicative sense as the adult. In other words, when we internalize a linguistic symbol, that is, when we learn the human perspectives embodied in this symbol, we cognitively represent both the perceptual and motor aspects of the symbol and the ways in which the symbol can be attentionally interpreted by us, i.e. by us as language users. Of course, this explanation also helps us appreciate the idea of an ostensive inferential mechanism and its nuclear property: relevance. However, how can we define trust directly? Trust is a relationship of dependency that is indifferent to risk and based on mutual respect (Tuomela and Hofmann, 2003). The importance of the ability to trust, and the act of trusting, is that it enables an energetic rest; a rest from thinking and being aware that when an individual recognizes another as a party for a collaborative exchange, the other is doing precisely the same. Trust is necessary for reciprocal altruism, an important source of our sociability. Based on a more elaborate notion of trust several facts could be explained further, such as, for instance, why cooperation was and is possible (it is known that cooperation is one of the best survival strategies and that without cooperation the possibility of representing agents, goals and referents would have been unlikely (Axelrod, 1997; Hurford, 2007, 2012); why language was and is possible (without trust, the time wasted on self-sustenance would have worked against the semantic fixing necessary in a communal and communicative life (Carey, 2009)); and why the cognitive apparatus is so complex (both memorys flexibility and capacity, and the ability to process and sort categories and schemes, are linked to the complex attitude of tolerance to detach ourselves from our egocentric stage, and they are connected, also, to the continuous creation of a disposition to positive expectation (Carey, 2009)).

3. Collective and intentional beings 3.1 Intentionality in the Principle of Relevance by Sperber and Wilson Nevertheless, what matters for the description and explanation of strictly human cooperative behavior is intentional cooperation. The chapter of intentionality has a long history in Western philosophy (Anscombe, [1957] 2000; Bratman, 1999; Cohen, Morgan and Pollock, 1990; Hickerson, 2007; Searle, 1983). As indicated by Hurford (2007: 320-322), from an evolutionary perspective, even when there is some disagreement on the definition of intentionality, the idea that there can be shared intentionality without a shared language seems to be generally accepted. Shared intentionality is displayed by babies before they start talking and cooperating in the game of imitation and communication, even in the absence of a specific goal. Material cooperation, which can be violated by sentences with disruptive content, is the exception in the social, not the rule. The problem of intentionality in the theory of relevance of Sperber and Wilson seems to be central. Nevertheless, the authors do not devote a special chapter to this problem. Intentionality is dealt with in the context of ostensive behavior or communication. Actually, for Sperber and Wilson (1995: 46-50), the principle of relevance is the working face of ostension. They define ostension as the conduct that shows the intention of making something manifest. The authors explain this point as follows:

Ostensive behaviour provides evidence of ones thoughts. It succeeds in doing so because it implies a guarantee of relevance. It implies such a guarantee because humans automatically turn their attention to what seems most relevant to them. The main thesis of this book is that an act of ostension carries a guarantee of relevance, and that this fact which we will call the principle of relevance makes manifest the intention behind the ostension. We believe that it is this principle of relevance that is needed to make the inferential model of communication explanatory. (1995: 50)

If ostension is to make manifest our intention to manifest a basic level of information, then, according to Sperber and Wilson, ostensive inferential communication can be described both in terms of informative intention and communicative intention. As is the case with other divisions of intentionality (e.g. individual intentionality and social intentionality (Searle, 1995)), the distinction is motivated by a particular theoretical perspective. By informative intention Sperber and Wilson (1995: 54-59) understand an intention to directly modify, the listeners cognitive environment, rather than his thoughts. By cognitive environment they mean (1995: 35) the set of available assumptions or facts which, being representations that an agent accepts or could accept as true, are activated according to contexts and activities. In this way, for Sperber and Wilson intention is a psychological state whose content is mentally represented. The senders informative intention is to make manifest in a specific context some particular assumptions, which can be transmitted even through evocation. Communicative intention (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 60-64), on the other hand, is that behavior of the sender that makes manifest for both him and the listener that the sender has a specific communicative intention. By distinguishing these two types of intentions, Sperber and Wilson (1995) explicate two types of intentional communicative behavior. One type is displayed when informing, and results in the alteration of the listeners cognitive environment. The other type manifests itself indeed as communicative, and results in the alteration of the cognitive environment of both sender and listener. This change in the cognitive environment of both parties opens the door to an alteration of the possibilities of interactions, moving from cognitive significance the informative intention to social significance the communicative intention.4 The explanation given by Sperber and Wilson of what they consider the core mechanism of communicative ostensive inferential behavior, i.e. relevance, explicitly aims at the analysis of a psychological phenomenon (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 32). At least intuitively, there seems to be no contradiction with the idea of cooperation, nor with the idea of collective intentionality. But they, first, explicitly rule out Grices cooperative principle and later the entire domain of cooperation. Second, there appears to be no reference in their explanation to the possible existence of collective intentionality, which I shall argue is essential to understand and explain linguistic communication. As regards Sperber and Wilsons discussion (1995: 161-162) of Grices theory, they indicate that there are several differences between the latter and the approach they propose. Among other differences, theirs is a scientific task which explores what they consider to be applicable to any type of communication, regardless of whether subjects are aware of the application of a principle of relevance, while Grice, according to their interpretation, by treating relevance as a maxim, only seeks compliance to a norm. The central argument through which the authors question the idea that cooperation is a principle guiding the functioning of psychological communication is the following: since the principle of relevance is omnipresent, independent of any consideration as to the knowledge of its existence, a cooperative attitude has no effect upon, and an uncooperative attitude does not violate communication itself, which means that the speakers level of cooperation in an exchange and the operation of relevance are different things. Sperber and Wilsons aim is to explain
4

A closely related topic, which Sperber and Wilson do not develop in their flagship publication on relevance, is that of mind-reading (Goldman, 2006). The topic is pertinent because by making manifest some assumptions to the listener, the listener can identify the inferential processes of the speaker, identify his priorities, and his possible intentions. That is to say, in natural communication speakers build theories of mind about others and, in particular, they put themselves in the place of oth ers prompted by all kind of stimuli. This is a strictly human evolutionary achievement. Another way of naming this phenomenon is empathy.

why and how human beings pursue satisfactory or successful communication, to point out the reason why this is sometimes not achieved, and to demonstrate that cooperation is often a costly form of behavior that is not advantageous for an organism that needs to save energy and avoid causing others to expend unnecessary effort. For Sperber and Wilson it is possible to be relevant without being cooperative. But as I have argued earlier, evidence shows that the evolutionary path is exactly the opposite. According to Sperber and Wilson (1995), intentional conducts are only visible through their effects, by observing their achievements. In ostensive communication the communicative effect pursued is the recognition of the informative intention. The role of the addressee is crucial. In their theory,, the role of the recipient is based on an assumption, namely, that the sender is communicating rationally, that he has good reasons to believe that the stimulus will have the desired effect. The intention of the sender is determined, thus, by the listeners reaction. This idea could give cooperation a key role, a point that the authors do not seem to fully acknowledge. In connection with the recipients role, they argue:
By making her informative intention mutually manifest, the communicator creates the following situation: it becomes mutually manifest that the fulfilment of her informative intention is, so to speak, in the hands of the audience. If the assumptions that she intends to make manifest to the audience become manifest, then she is successful; if the audience refuses to accept these assumptions as true or probably true, then she has failed in her informative intention. (1995: 62)

That the fulfillment of the speakers intention is, after all, in the hands of the recipient requires, most of the time, a tendency towards cooperation not only for a correct understanding, but also to participate adequately in the type of linguistic and communicative activity that unfolds with such an intention. With these arguments, Sperber and Wilson pave the way for the idea that, eventually, the senders intention does not have causal power, that is to say, that his intention to be relevant has no effect if the audience does not adequately read the information sent. Put differently, we will never know, in this type of scenario, if the propositional content of the speakers intention was relevant. The speaker can argue and explain then that it was relevant for certain reasons, disambiguating as far as possible his utterances, but this would only take place once the listener has asked for clarification, which would already be energy- and time-consuming. A request for clarification is a basic cooperative behavior of communication as far as we know, humans are the only beings that ask for clarification (Tomasello, 2008: 3). If the sender has the intention to cooperate when responding to the request for clarification after he has expressed an opinion or a belief, then some notion of collective intentionality would be necessary to account for the type of activity in which he is immersed: a collective and social activity.

3.2. Relevance and Collective Intentionality Collective intentionality is a primitive biological phenomenon that goes hand in hand with the phenomenon of cooperation (Searle, 1990, 1995, 2010; Tomasello et al., 2005; Tomasello et al., 2010). Collective intentionality cannot be reduced to or broken down into individuals. Individual intentionality, in linguistic communicative contexts among humans, requires collective intentionality (Searle, 1995, 2010). Collective intentionality is the intentionality that refers to, and is about, institutional facts such as language and communal acts. To take part in it, we do not need any particular belief or specific intentional state; it is natural to our collective organization, because it is part of the structural background of the human (Searle, 2010). Since shared intentionality emerged among humans, at some point in their evolution, collective action and the conversational mode became two of its essential features. Searle (2002) refers to collective intention in terms of Weintentions and explicitly argues the following: The reason that we-intentions cannot be reduced to I-intentions, even I-intentions supplemented with beliefs and beliefs about mutual beliefs, can be

stated quite generally. The notion of a we-intentions, of collective intentionality, implies the notion of cooperation. (Searle, 2002: 95) If we accept Sperber and Wilsons idea that relevance is a computational principle in the mental system by means of which the speaker and listener seek cognitive alterations and to economize on time and energy, then we should accept that this is such a principle by virtue of the common or collective intentionality between the speaker and listener who want to save time and energy; it is not just one of the parties who has this objective. Thus understood, relevance could be an example of collective intentionality, as Searle (1995) seems to suggest. In this way, relevance would be a collective, not psychological, formula. Communication and dialogue would be its natural context. The research in evolutionary psychology summarized by Tomasello (2008; Tomasello et al., 2010) and discussed in subsection 2.1 points in the same direction. This perspective attributes an infrastructural place to shared intentionality and cooperation in human communication. Unlike Searle (1990, 1995, 2002) and Tuomela (2010), Tomasellos approach, like Sperber and Wilsons, is psychological. However, between Tomasello and Sperber and Wilson, the difference would be conceptual and relating to evidence or proofs. The idea of relevance, in Tomasellos approach (2008: 74), is conceptually bound to the notions of context and shared inter-subjectivity, referred to by Clarke (1996) as common conceptual ground, and which Tomasello (2008) renamed joint attention scene. Another important concept in Tomasellos (2008: 105) perspective is recursion, which refers to the social fact characterized by an underlying iterative structure when we send messages I know you know I know and which is of mutual knowledge and shows that such messages have communicative and referential intentions. From this it follows that human communication is recursive only because it is fully cooperative. But cooperative in what terms? In the following terms: there are cooperation norms in human communication, shared objectives and intentions, and joint attention. Cooperation manifests itself in cooperative reasoning, and there are communicative conventions. The concept of common conceptual ground is often considered a very broad term. However, at least three categories of common conceptual ground can be distinguished. First, there is an immediate perceptual environment common to those involved and which in the communal context co-exists with shared past experiences. Second, there is a common ground emerging from two distinct processes: processes of goals, such as when agents pursue a common objective and they know that both focus at the same time on elements that are relevant to their joint objective; and processes of results, such as when two persons that are together receive the same stimulus and they realize they did something jointly. Third, common ground can be based on cultural generalizations, sometimes not fully explicit and at times highly known and conventionalized, introduced in communicative contexts by cultural markers of different sorts. It should be noted that Tomasello (2008) arrives at the idea of collective intentionality also through the idea of social motivation, i.e. by analyzing the types of acts which, from an evolutionary perspective, played a key role in shaping the type of the human communication we have today. Two of these acts are helping and sharing. There is a vast range of ways in which we humans help and ask help from others. Unlike the apes imperative gesture of the kind, give it to me or Ill knock out your teeth! we are a tremendously flexible species when it comes to asking for help or giving help, because we do so with emotional emphases of a different order. Within this spectrum of activities, another essential feature is that we assist others without having been asked and we share feelings and attitudes about objects and third parties without receiving direct benefits in the immediate context. All these facets of our communicative exchanges became social motivations through an evolutionary process that finally allowed groups to create norms and institutions when the individual turned from the rational regulation of his actions to the social norms of joint rational actions.

4. Principle of relevance: epilogue Although our discussion has been austere, the evolutionary perspective assumed here is neither random nor gratuitous. It is also prompted by Sperber and Wilsons attempt at clarifying their position in the second edition of Relevance (1995), through an epilogue commenting on the evolutionary implications of the notion of relevance, particularly concerning cognitive specialization. They argue that there are two principles of relevance underlying their approach: one is cognitive and the other communicative. Regarding the cognitive principle of relevance, they argue that human cognition simply tends to be geared towards the maximization of relevance. Concerning the communicative principle of relevance, the definition has already been provided: every act of ostensive communication communicates its own presumption of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 260). According to Sperber and Wilson (1995: 262), cognition tends to the maximization of relevance because it is a beneficial biological mechanism, developed over time, naturally selected as a mechanism with cognitive effects of great importance and with low energy cost. This explanation, however, could be similar to any other which describes why there is some other type of adaptation, since Sperber and Wilson (1995: 261; Sperber, Cara and Girotto, 1995) expressly assume that cognition is a biological function and that, as such, its mechanisms are adaptations. Loyal to the modular view, the authors point out that cognition is also the joint product of several specialized mechanisms. Taken together, these mechanisms make up the cognitive system and the efficiency of the cognitive system as a whole would depend on how they articulate between themselves and how they share resources, in a context where articulation and location of resources must be such so as to maximize its operation by collecting the most relevant information available through the most relevant processing at hand (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 262). Hence the importance of a process such as relevance: it works as a constant filter between specialized modules. Even though after the second edition of Relevance both Dan Sperber (2001b, 2005, Mercier and Sperber, 2009) and Deirdre Wilson (2005) have moderated their views on the modularity of the mind and cognition, the idea that mind and cognition are made up of specialized nuclei of vertical faculties (vision, hearing, motor control, language (Jackendoff, 2007)) seems to persist. Deirdre Wilson (2005), however, has introduced a perspective that is more in line with other perspectives. Wilson (2005) has argued for the existence of a cognitive system composed of dedicated mechanisms. These mechanisms would be natural adaptations and relevance, an inferential procedure with a special purpose, one of its core characteristics being that of causing a mutual adjustment between explicit content or information and what is implied in a message, in particular when the speaker reads the mind of the listener to send his message. According to Wilson (2005), and criticizing Fodor (1983), evidence shows that Grice, in the end, rightly conceived natural human pragmatic behavior as an inferential phenomenon.

5. Conclusion: relevance and argumentation The analysis of the problem of the nature and function of inference in communication is crucial in Relevance. After all, it is the second chapter written and the first one indeed to go into details. Perhaps following this line of work, Dan Sperber has recently (Mercier and Sperber, 2011a, 2011b; Sperber and Mercier, in press; Mercier and Sperber, 2009; Sperber, 2001) added a new phenomenon and certainly a whole new dimension to his thinking, namely, argumentation. Argumentation is, according to several authors and theories (Johnson 2000, van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 2004, Walton and Krabbe, 1995), a social activity in which mental faculties, such as inference, are expressed and where relevance is a fundamental criterion to critically evaluate communication. This general definition could also coincide with Tomasellos (2008) idea of cooperative reasoning.

According to Johnson (2000), relevance in argumentation is basically related to three aspects: 1) topical relevance, i.e. whether the reasons given by an agent are pertinent to the subject under discussion, 2) internal relevance, i.e. whether the reasons, understood as premises, allow or not to draw the conclusion advanced by one of the parties, and 3) relevance to the audience, i.e. whether the reasons used are pertinent to the listener or listeners to whom the argument is directed. Thus, relevance is: 1) a phenomenon of degrees (it is strongly tied to context, which means that what can be very pertinent to the problem under discussion can be less relevant to the audience), 2) by definition a dialectical matter (it depends on the exchanges between the parties in the discussion, since what may seem irrelevant at the beginning of a dialogue can become important at a later stage), and 3) not at all a problem that can be exemplified with automatic and trivial exchanges (often automatic exchanges that at first glance seem conflicting become pseudo-problems once they are analyzed in depth). From this perspective, connecting in these final words the phenomenon of relevance with argumentation, will allow me to raise some criticisms on Sperber and Wilsons initial position and at the same time analyze the reassessment that Sperber himself has made of concepts such as trust. One of the basic criticisms that could be made against Relevance is that the examples provided by the authors to demonstrate the inferential operation of relevance in everyday communication are, for the most part, trivial examples that do not really measure the importance of the principle of relevance, inasmuch as people are concerned about relevant or irrelevant behavior when there is something under dispute or under evaluation in their communication. The latter are actions involving the giving of reasons and the use of discursive strategies. Trivial examples account for almost automatic situations and not for problems in which communicative relevance is traded locally and globally. In recent writings, Sperber explains the function of argumentation from an evolutionary angle.5 Sperber (2001) considers that argumentation evolved as a specialized mechanism to process messages and which, from the senders perspective, is aimed at persuasion, and from the point of view of the audience, serves as epistemic vigilance (Mercier and Sperber, in press; Sperber et al., 2010). Sperber (2001) also argues that the origin of this module lies in the need of the listener or audience to develop ways of calibrating trust given the process of accepting information, which should be actually beneficial to maintain communication, and the costs associated with the processing of that information. In other words, in his recent work Sperber sees argumentation as a module that is by definition relevantist, but on the basis of a trust mechanism. Sperber (2001: 406) argues: ... [in argumentation] the potential benefits are so important, and the risks of deception so serious, that all available means of calibration of trust may well have evolved .... In a recent attempt to describe argumentative competence, Desalles (2007: 309) casts doubt on Sperber and Wilsons theory (1995) in relation to the operation of relevance in situations of cognitive conflict. Desalles considers their theory of communication too broad and unhelpful when it comes to understand why having language in situations of argumentative evaluation empowers people. From a trivial informative perspective, relevance is a parameter that measures the probability that a message will be useful, while from an argumentative point of view, relevance should be linked to the mechanism that detects cognitive conflicts and launches its posterior resolution. Put differently, relevance in these two different contexts informational and argumentative is implemented with different competences. As it would be inappropriate to extend these final words to the implications of the authors new reflections on the definition of argumentation, I would only like to emphasize that the concepts of cooperation and trust would be, conceptually speaking, indirectly incorporated both in Sperber
5

In most of his writings, Sperber has chosen to approach human reality from an evolutionary perspective. In one of his publications (2007), he also has attempted to describe the links, or similarities, between nature and culture through the notion of artifacts, which he conceives as adaptations of biological or cultural functions, respectively. In this work, as in others (Sperber and Wilson, 1997), he opts for a naturalistic theory of the social and behavioral sciences, including linguistics and psychology. Moreover, it is worth noting that his strong emphasis on the need to explain culture from a psychological basis (Sperber, 2006) situates the ideas of causal cognitive chain, imitation and cultural cognitive chain in an epidemiological pattern in which the mental is conceived as the mechanism bringing together cognitive representations with social ones.

and Wilsons principle of relevance (1995) and in their subsequent considerations. Cooperation and trust are concepts that are part of evolutionary explanations of communicative competences, not conventional social dispositions, as Sperber and Wilson suggest. For a theory of the principle of relevance to be complete, it would be necessary to include variables that make possible its linguistic expression, such as the concepts of cooperation and trust, but also that of collective intentionality. Recursion in the argumentative mode of conversational behavior, which develops by virtue of the social and collective exposure of view points among participants who ask for reasons and, progressively, for the interlocking of those reasons according to the results of those chains of reasons, reveals not only the specific intelligence of our species, but also, and above all, its communal origin among individuals who trust the stability of cooperation in linguistic communication.

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