I have two more disagreements with the relevance-theoretic approach to metaphor. The first one is a general concern about the project. In this view, the possible interpretations are not determined by the principle of cooperation and the maxims working in accordance with it, but rather a cognitive principle. The speaker chooses the optimally relevant utterance to express her thought, and the hearer chooses the optimally relevant interpretation. However, the speaker and the hearer are two different cognitive agencies, and the optimal relevancies on both sides may not match. What guarantees the success of communication?
Let us discuss this issue further. In the classical Gricean picture, the speaker is supposed to build an argument. The conclusion of this argument is the thought she intends to implicate, and the premises involve the followings: (i) The content which is explicitly expressed (what-is-said in the Gricean sense), (ii) the Cooperative Principle and the maxims, and (iii) the contextual information which the speaker presupposes to be accessible to all interlocutors. In the same picture, the hearer’s aim is to reconstruct the speaker’s argument. What he is supposed to use in his argu-
3Tautologous metaphors such as “War is war” or “Brexit means Brexit” seem also problematic
for the ad hoc concept approach to metaphor, given that the same word is supposed to directly and explicitly “say” two different things in the same sentence.
ment are: (i) The content which is explicitly expressed (what-is-said in the Gricean sense), (ii) the Cooperative Principle and the maxims, and (iii) the contextual infor- mation which the hearer presupposes that the speaker presupposes to be accessible to all interlocutors. If communication fails, the first point to check is the arguments the speaker constructs and the hearer reconstructs. These arguments might fail to match for a few reasons. For instance, one of them might not be valid. Or one of the peers might mistake the Cooperative Principle and the maxims. However, these are not likely possibilities. Since we assume that conversational participants are rational individuals, when the communication fails, the problem will be more likely caused by the mismatch between the speaker and the hearer’s presuppositions about the contextual information. One should examine a communication problem by comparing the presuppositions about the context.
On the other hand, in RT’s framework, the success of communication between two peers depends on a cognitive measure of Relevance. This notion of Relevance is very different from the Gricean maxim of Relevance. What Grice means by the maxim (“be relevant”) is the requirement to say something related with the con- textual information, that is accessible to conversational participants. For example, in one interpretation of this Gricean maxim as we have seen in Section 4.1.4, the interlocutors are supposed to answer certain questions in a given context, and a proposition that is expressed by an utterance would be considered relevant only if it partially or completely answers one of these questions. In contrast, the relevance- theoretic notion of Relevance is described as an input’s being relevant not to a context but to an individual: “An input is relevant to an individual when it con- nects with available contextual assumptions to yield positive cognitive effects: for example, true contextual implications, or warranted strengthenings or revisions of existing assumptions” (Wilson and Sperber 2012, p.6). Thus, the speaker puts her message into words so as to be optimally relevant for the hearer. The speaker, by uttering a sentence, not only conveys her message but also conveys the assumption that the message is optimally relevant. The hearer, similarly assumes that the input is optimally relevant for him and tries to figure out the interpretation which makes the uttered sentence optimally relevant for him. Wilson and Sperber describe this process as follows:
A hearer using the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic dur- ing online comprehension should proceed in the following way. The aim is to find an interpretation of the speaker’s meaning that satisfies the pre- sumption of optimal relevance. To achieve this aim, the hearer must en- rich the decoded sentence meaning at the explicit level, and complement
it at the implicit level by supplying contextual assumptions which will combine with it to yield enough conclusions (or other positive cognitive effects) to make the utterance relevant in the expected way. What route should he follow in disambiguating, assigning reference, constructing a context, deriving conclusions, and so on? According to the relevance- theoretic comprehension heuristic, he should follow a path of least effort, and stop at the first overall interpretation that satisfies his expectations of relevance. This is the key to relevance-theoretic pragmatics. (Wilson and Sperber 2012, p.7)
As I mentioned above, the optimal relevancy judgements of the speaker and the hearer might not match. The speaker might think that a piece of information is optimally relevant for the hearer, but the hearer might think that it is not so for him. Or the two conversational participants might arrive at different interpretations which are optimally relevant for them. We are inclined to call these situations communication failures, however RT does not agree on this. As the quoted passage suggests, according to Wilson and Sperber, optimally relevant first interpretation is the correct interpretation. I find this idea very counter-intuitive.4 I think Gricean
framework suggests a more plausible picture of human communication than the relevance-theoretic one. The fundamental problem with RT is that RT considers relevancy relevance for an agent instead of relevance to a context. Yielding positive cognitive effects is sufficient for an interpretation to be relevant and correct, but such a position of linguistic interpretation does not seem tenable.
The consequence of this discussion for metaphorical language should be clear. The problem about the relevance-theoretic approach to linguistic interpretation is also a problem for the interpretation of metaphors. In fact, the problem is more seri- ous for metaphors. Since the interpretation of metaphors depends heavily on context and what a conversational participant associates with a kind or an object, the cri- terion of optimal relevancy is less likely to be successful as a criterion for correct interpretation. It seems that the more context dependent a linguistic phenomenon, the more likely the optimal relevancy fails to give the correct interpretation; an interpretation can yield positive cognitive effects but can still be incorrect.
My second disagreement with relevance theorists concerns their view that meta- phorical meaning is not implicated. I touched on this issue in Section4.3.3. Let me revisit it briefly. According to RT, a metaphorical concept is generated by the mod- ulation of the concept the metaphorically used phrase expresses. This modulatedad hocconcept is part of the explicitly expressed proposition called “explicature”, which
RT claims to correspond to the literal meaning or Gricean what-is-said. Hence, the metaphorical meaning is not implicated. I argued against this position in Section
4.3.3. There I claimed that we can (and we should) distinguish what is explicitly expressed from what-is-implicated in metaphorical interpretation. An important piece of evidence that we can make this distinction is that when the suggestion for metaphorical interpretation by the speaker is not accepted by the hearer for some reason, she (the speaker) has to admit that what she explicitly expresses is different from what she means. The reason why we should make this distinction is that in metaphorical speaking, as several theorists have argued, literal or explicitly expressed meaning is essential for the interpretation of the metaphor and for the cases where metaphor is extended. Since, I presented all these arguments in detail in Section 4.3.3, I will not go into the other details here.