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Deirdre Wilson

RELEVANCE AND UNDERSTANDING

[Published in G. Brown, K. Malmkjaer, A. Pollitt & J. Williams (eds) Language and understanding. (1994). Oxford University Press, Oxford: 35-58]

1. Introduction

A certain politician – call her Margaret – is speaking to us on television. As she speaks, we are all noticing certain facts about her, interpreting these in the light of certain assumptions of our own, and coming to certain conclusions. In a sense, all of these contribute to our understanding of Margaret's speech; one might even say that they are all part of what she has communicated to us. In this paper, however, I want to think of communication, and understanding, in a rather narrower sense.

Notice first that not all the conclusions we draw were intended by Margaret. Take our conclusion that she is nervous: this is something she would have preferred us not to notice. Take our conclusion that she has no sympathy for the unemployed: this is something she would strongly dispute; if we drew it, she would feel misunderstood. Here, I will leave aside these cases of accidental information transmission and look instead at the domain of intentional communication and understanding.

Often, intentional communication involves a degree of manipulation or concealment. Like many politicians, Margaret, as she speaks to us, is doing her best to appear more intelligent, more sympathetic, more knowledgeable than she really is. These intentions can only succeed if they remain hidden: obviously, if we realise that Margaret wants us to think that she is nicer than she is, we are not going to be deceived. I want to leave aside these cases of covert communication and concentrate instead on a more basic, overt type of communication which we all engage in every time we speak.

In overt communication, there are no hidden intentions of the type described above. The speaker wants to convey a certain message, is actively helping the hearer to recognise it, and would acknowledge it if asked. During the question session after her talk, Margaret points to the back of the hall and says "I'll take a question from the gentleman in blue." In saying "the gentleman in blue", she clearly intends to refer to someone, and clearly wants her intention recognised; to the extent that it is not, communication will fail. In this paper, I will take communication to mean overt, intentional communication, and understanding to mean recovering the overtly intended interpretation. I will try to show that understanding an utterance in this sense amounts to seeing its intended relevance: relevance and understanding are two sides of a single coin.

2. Understanding overt communication

Someone might claim that understanding an utterance is a simple matter of linguistic decoding. Margaret is speaking to us in English: it might be claimed that all we need to understand her is a knowledge of English. Virtually any utterance can be used to show that this hypothesis is wrong. There is a gap between knowing what a sentence of English means and understanding all that a speaker intends to communicate by uttering it on any given occasion. Communication and understanding involve more than mere linguistic encoding and decoding.

The examples that demonstrate the gap between sentence meaning and utterance interpretation fall into three main categories, corresponding to three main questions that the hearer of an utterance has to answer: (a) what did the speaker intend to say? (b) what did the speaker intend to imply, and (c) what was the speaker's intended attitude to what was said and implied? I will look at these questions in turn.