Preliminaries

The central thesis of this book is that relevance theory, pioneered by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, can be developed into an all-encompassing theory for modeling communication, including its visual and multimodal mass-communicative varieties. The first chapter paves the way for this claim by discussing a series of studies from different disciplines that together paint a picture of the basic assumptions underlying communication. Ultimately relevance theory is rooted in the Darwinian drive to survive and to reproduce. Aspects of this are the crucial importance of intentionality; the close link between perception and cognition; the need for group members to cooperate to achieve shared goals; the connection between information and attitudes, emotions, and beliefs pertaining to that information; and agreement about what is “fair” behavior. To support these claims, key insights are discussed and summarized in studies of two psycholinguists (Gibbs 1999; Clark 1996), two film scholars (Bordwell 1989; Grodal 2009), two art historians (Gombrich 1999; Arnheim 1969), two scholars working on communication with apes (Tomasello 2008, 2019; De Waal 2009, 2016), and several humanities and social science scholars inspired by Darwin’s evolution theory (Boyd et al. 2010).