RT list: Introductory Note
Hello, All,
I want to thank Nick Allott for providing links to the two articles I
mentioned in my post yesterday. I tried the top two he gives, and
they both worked for getting pdf's.
Let me add a note on myself, since that’s the protocol for newbies.
I’m Howard D. White, a professor emeritus at Drexel University in
Philadelphia, where I taught in what is now the College of Information
Science and Technology for 27 years. Most of my students were seeking
master’s degrees to become librarians and information specialists. I
still teach such students in an online Drexel course on developing and
evaluating research collections.
My Ph.D. in library and information science is from the University of
California at Berkeley (1974). I did not know Paul Grice or John
Searle there, but I was aware of them. My supervising professor,
Patrick Wilson, who took his Ph.D. in philosophy (also at UC Berkeley),
attended some of Grice’s seminars in the 1970s. I recall he told me
one of the discussions he heard was so convoluted as to be
“Byzantine.” But in general he was steeped in Anglo-American analytic
philosophy, which he applied to questions of information science in his
excellent books.
I came to relevance theory (RT) by way of Grice, whose maxims map
nicely onto just those properties one wants in an information service
(e.g., a library reference desk). A few information scientists have
noted this in print (including me in one of the articles mentioned
above), but analysis thus far has been shallow. I may have been drawn
to RT by reading “Psychological relevance and information science,” the
1992 article by Stephen Harter that was the first to make serious use
of
Sperber & Wilson in my field. (It’s in Francisco Yus’s
bibliography.) However, I believe my first influence was Regina
Blass’s book Relevance relations in discourse. Over the years
I’ve concluded that RT has the greatest explanatory power for the
cognitive side of information science, and I’m working now on various
elaborations of that idea for publication.
I have a Website
where one can see my articles, books, and professional awards.
Received on Thu Jan 14 17:35:10 2010
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