Reply #18: Relevance. [View All]

[Igel]

Because he says that there was an assassination and places in the context of Wikileaks, we assume that they're related. That the two bits of information are relevant to each other. Relevance is a really nasty thing in pragmatic inferencing, it's so easily manipulated. As any politician or lawyer would tell you, if they had the explicit conceptual framework for the explanation.

John: "Did you miss work yesterday?"
Burt: "Yes. I ate a pizza the night before."

Of course, the reason Burt missed work had nothing to do with pizza. Instead he was busy interviewing with John's competitor--he did have pizza the night before, of course. But John's next question will involve trying to piece together how the pizza was relevant to Burt's absence--or John will simply assume food poisoning. It depends how insistent John is on having the relevance made explicit. If they're friends so that John wants to avoid giving Burt a hard time, explicitness won't be important.

John: "That happened to me once. Sushi."

Assange could have easily as said, "People whose name begins with 'K' have already been assassinated." No reason stated, but we assume that somehow having a name beginning with 'K' *must* be relevant, otherwise Assange is incoherent.

But that would be redundant.