beforeword · English transcription of the sent letter
Intended recipient: Dan Sperber
Author: Kirill Shebetov · beforeword
Sent to: dan@sperber.fr
Sending date in the supplied materials: The header shows only “Friday”; the calendar date is not shown.
The sending timezone is not supplied.
Status: shown in the Sent folder; no reply published.
The published materials do not establish receipt or reading by the recipient.
Record: https://beforeword.xyz/letters/researchers/sperber/en/#record
Record data: https://beforeword.xyz/letters/researchers/sperber/record.json
Russian translation: https://beforeword.xyz/letters/researchers/sperber/#letter
Transcribed from author-supplied screenshots. Screen line wraps are joined and overlaps included once; wording and punctuation are retained.
beforeword’s context and links to discussed publications are separate on the letter page.

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Subject: Reading this letter: what the wording does not encode

Dear Professor Sperber,

In “Relevance Theory” (2004), you and Deirdre Wilson describe interpretation as requiring “an appropriate set of contextual assumptions, which the hearer must also supply”.

Your account explicitly treats the resulting interpretation as a hypothesis that may be false.

Please indicate, for one sentence in this letter, a contextual assumption not encoded in its wording that supports an inference about the writer’s intended meaning, and the grounds for using it.

beforeword proposes keeping three elements separately inspectable: the written sentence, the meaning attributed to its writer, and the assumptions and grounds supporting that attribution.

The terms “meaning”, “intention” and “context” remain part of the writing under examination. Any proposed criterion and its justification, human self-descriptions, and this letter receive the same treatment.

The reading procedure and worked examples:
https://beforeword.xyz/model/en/

Kirill Shebetov
beforeword

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