The roots of relevance

Abstract

Since 1986, due to the influential work of Sperber and Wilson, the English lexicon has been enriched with a newly coined technical sense of the word ‘relevant’. It did not catch on. As the world struggled to come to grips with the implications, entailments and presuppositions od this new definition of relevance, the voices of protest, best summarised in Sperber and Wilson (1987), began to intone a set of common themes: selection restrictions too narrow in scope, clashes in argument structure, lack of links to motivational phenomena, to mention but a few. In this paper we shall argue that Sperber and Wilson's concept of relevance is but a particular instance of the ordinary English term ‘relevant’ and that the technical sense which they have introduced is superfluous, counter-productive, counter-intuitive, and stands in the way of an appreciation of the real value of the work they have accomplished. The paper ends with some suggestions for future research.