Discourse Evocation: Its Cognitive Foundations and Its Role in Speech and Texts

Sperber's theory of cognitive evocation aims at accounting both for the processing of olfactory stimuli and for the symbolic interpretation of reflective beliefs. Yet, any proper analysis of smell processing is incompatible with the deferential theory Sperber adopts when dealing with reflective belief contents. Moreover, not all reflective beliefs can be characterized in deferential terms. In a non-deferential framework, a belief is reflective if its propositional content includes an unanalyzed concept, i.e., a concept that does not define any proper sub-field of a cognitively accessible field. Unanalyzed concepts are quite similar to the unanalyzed percepts one has to posit when analyzing smell processing, and share a basic feature with them: when emerging or being recalled, they trigger the formation or recollection of autobiographical engrains stored in the episodic memory. In line with Boyer's theory of traditional truth, one can assume that cognitive evocation always leads to a causal hypothesis where the content processed appears as meaning naturally some propositional content, in that it is caused by the corresponding fact. This causalist approach provides well-motivated foundations for a general model of concept formation and for an adequate characterization of discourse evocation viewed as an opportunistic strategy that relies on the awareness human beings may entertain of cognitive evocation.