This revised edition includes a new Preface outlining developments in Relevance Theory since 1986, discussing the more serious criticisms of the theory, and ...

The intentional stance is the strategy of prediction and explanation that attributes beliefs, desires, and other states to systems and predicts future behavior from what it would be rational for an agent to do, given those beliefs and desires. Any system whose performance can be thus predicted and explained is an intentional system, whatever its innards. The strategy of treating parts of the world as intentional systems is the foundation of but is also exploited in artificial intelligence and cognitive science (...) more generally, as well as in evolutionary theory. An analysis of the role of the intentional stance and its presuppositions supports a naturalistic theory of mental states and events, their content or intentionality, and the relation between levels of explanation and neurophysiological or mechanistic levels of explanation. As such, the analysis of the intentional stance grounds a theory of the mind and its relation to the body. (shrink)

Is the Concept of Incongruity Still a Useful Construct for the Advancement of Humor Research? The perception of incongruity is considered to be a necessary, though not sufficient, component of the humor experience. Incongruity has been investigated in the philosophical tradition for centuries, and it goes back as far as Aristotle's definition of the comic as based on a particular form of απάτη. In modern times, many theoretical models, as well as empirical works, are based on this concept. The question (...) is here raised whether the concept of incongruity has already been examined and exploited to its full potential, and nothing new, of theoretical or experimental usefulness, may be drawn from it. It is proposed to conceptualize incongruity as follows: a stimulus is perceived as incongruous when it diverts from the cognitive model of reference. In this perspective, a number of observations are advanced which point to a heuristic property of incongruity still open to interesting developments, both for theory and for applications. (shrink)

Drama, at least according to the Aristotelian view, is effective inasmuch as it successfully mirrors real aspects of human behavior. This leads to the hypothesis that successful dramas will portray fictional social networks that have the same properties as those typical of human beings across ages and cultures. We outline a methodology for investigating this hypothesis and use it to examine ten of Shakespeare’s plays. The cliques and groups portrayed in the plays correspond closely to those which have been observed (...) in spontaneous human interaction, including in hunter-gatherer societies, and the networks of the plays exhibit “small world” properties of the type which have been observed in many human-made and natural systems. (shrink)

Hyperlink cinema is an emergent film genre that seeks to push the boundaries of the medium in order to mirror contemporary life in the globalized community. Films in the genre thus create an interacting network across space and time in such a way as to suggest that people’s lives can intersect on scales that would not have been possible without modern technologies of travel and communication. This allows us to test the hypothesis that new kinds of media might permit us (...) to break through the natural cognitive constraints that limit the number and quality of social relationships we can manage in the conventional face-to-face world. We used network analysis to test this hypothesis with data from 12 hyperlink films, using 10 motion pictures from a more conventional film genre as a control. We found few differences between hyperlink cinema films and the control genre, and few differences between hyperlink cinema films and either the real world or classical drama (e.g., Shakespeare’s plays). Conversation group size seems to be especially resilient to alteration. It seems that, despite many efficiency advantages, modern media are unable to circumvent the constraints imposed by our evolved psychology. (shrink)

Cooperation requires that individuals are able to identify, and preferentially associate with, others who have compatible preferences and the shared background knowledge needed to solve interpersonal coordination problems. This body of shared knowledge constitute a substantial proportion of what is called ‘culture’. It has been argued that, for this reason, individuals prefer to associate with others who share their culture, and also that shared appreciation of humor provides a particularly effective means of identifying others with the relevant preferences and knowledge. (...) The present experiment uses a ‘dummy rating procedure’ to compare the effects of sharing an appreciation of non-humorous (first lines of novels) and humorous (jokes) cultural stimuli on interpersonal affiliation, altruism and assessment. The results show that the degree of shared appreciation for both sets of stimuli had a positive effect on Affiliation; only humorous stimuli had an effect on Altruism; and neither effected the Assessment of others' personal traits. Thus, the results support the general theory that shared culture promotes affiliation, and provide evidence of the special role of humor in interpersonal relations. (shrink)