Dear readers of relevance mail
My name is Jan Strassheim. I am a student of philosophy, linguistics and
Greek at the Freie Universitdt Berlin. During my year as an affiliate at
UCL, I attended Deirdre Wilsons pragmatics course, which was bound to
make me an aficionado of RT.
In my MA thesis in philosophy, Im going to try and put forward a fairly
general theory of art with the concepts of relevance and poetic effect
at its core. However, I have some doubts as to the theoretical basis
that Id like to express to the List. The prospective range of that
relevance theory of art, if you can call it that, is currently forcing
me to generalise the basic elements and operations of RT (while keeping
to RTs immanent possibilities and roughly following Edmund Husserls
findings):
(1) As basic elements I would allow not only (propositional) assumptions
but all (conscious?) states of mind (like aspect perception, emotion, or
volition). One could translate all the latter into assumptions about
oneself, but I feel that extra level would mean assuming more than
necessary (and bring together two very different kinds of assumption).
So in order to link assumptions to other states of mind, I would,
instead of assuming a real thing such as an inner language which is
quite contentious among philosophers, propose a mere concept, in my case
phenomena, to do the job.
(2) As basic operations which work on elements I would allow not only
the three contextual effects given in Relevance (erasure, strength
modification, implication), but also non-logical operations, such as
association, analogy, emotional provocation, or even physical palpation.
(You can see that my main aim is not so much empirical clarification as
abstraction.)
(3) Such processes are good for the cognitive device not only because
through them it gets subjectively plausible information about the world,
but in general because they enhance its sheer internal variation and
irritability which are the motors of its evolutionary engagement with
the environment. Since I would define assumptions / emotions etc. as
well as perceived objects or events as phenomena (which term refers
only to the latter in Relevance), I would say that the relevance of a
phenomenon (assumption, object, utterance, etc.) for a cognitive device
is greater to the degree that the phenomenon can change or bring about
other phenomena in that device.
Im not sure if my project might be of any interest to you at any
rate, Id love to hear what you think about, or what you dont like
about, the above; for Im starting to get the wind up with my own
generalisations...
Best wishes to all of you
Jan
Jan Strassheim, Berlin, Germany
strassheim@gmx.de
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