relevance

Wilson en Sperber over rhetoric

The effect is to alter the individual's cognitive environment, by adding new beliefs, cancelling old ones, or merely altering the saliency or strength of beliefs already held. We may characterize a comparative notion of relevance in terms of effect and effort as follows:

(a) Everything else being equal, the greater the cognitive effect achieved by the processing of a given piece of information, the greater its relevance for the individual who processes it.

(b) Everything else being equal, the greater the effort involved in the processing of a given piece of information, the lesser its relevance for the individual who processes it.

Literalness, looseness, metaphor

In terms of relevance theory, the reader does not first consider and then reject the hypothesis that the writer meant to assert that Clarissa's face was a perfect oval. He just uses the idea expressed as a source of cognitive effects: he builds a mental representation of Clarissa's face which contains enough of the implications of the idea of its being a perfect oval - the general shape, a striking degree of regularity and symmetry - to justify the presumption of relevance

We claim that humans automatically aim at maximal relevance, i.e. maximal cognitive effect for minimal processing effort. This is the most general factor which determines the course of human information processing. It determines which information is paid attention to, which background assumptions are retrieved from memory and used as context, which inferences are drawn.