I want to pick at Simler & Hanson’s “relevance constraint” as meaningful evidence of a signaling thesis. There is a much simpler explanation for why conversations travel along throughlines of pertinence, which first must be dealt with, and accorded causational influence, before we get carried away with signaling: human cognition is fundamentally associative (see not just Lakoff & Hofstadter but William James). Our thought bounces from one relation to the next; this much is self-evidently clear. Why would two individuals performing cognition jointly differ significantly in this pattern? And what then is left over for the signaling explanation? Indeed, when one considers how loose the “relevance constraint” is in the first place—it really requires only one coherent point of departure to switch subjects—their argument appears all the weaker.
I want to pick at Simler & Hanson’s “relevance constraint” as meaningful evidence of a signaling thesis. There is a much simpler explanation for why conversations travel along throughlines of pertinence, which first must be dealt with, and accorded causational influence, before we get carried away with signaling: human cognition is fundamentally associative (see not just Lakoff & Hofstadter but William James). Our thought bounces from one relation to the next; this much is self-evidently clear. Why would two individuals performing cognition jointly differ significantly in this pattern? And what then is left over for the signaling explanation? Indeed, when one considers how loose the “relevance constraint” is in the first place—it really requires only one coherent point of departure to switch subjects—their argument appears all the weaker.