UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14 (2002)

Relevance and rationality

NICHOLAS ALLOTT


 

Subjects’ poor performance relative to normative standards on reasoning tasks has been supposed to have ‘bleak implications for rationality’ (Nisbett & Borgida, 1975).

More recent experimental work suggests that considerations of relevance underlie performance in at least some reasoning paradigms (Sperber et al., 1995; Girotto et al.,

2001; Van der Henst et al., 2002). It is argued here that this finding has positive implications for human rationality since the relevance theoretic comprehension procedure is computationally efficient and well-adapted to the ostensive communicative environment: it is a good example of bounded and adaptive rationality in Gigerenzer’s terms (Gigerenzer and Todd, 1999), and, uniquely, it is a fast and frugal satisficing heuristic which seeks optimal solutions.


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