August 25, 2006
Where's the beef?
Sweet product placement for Ruth's Chris Steak house ("No ordinary restaurant!" says their website) in a CNN online article this week:
It's all about relevance and order, two of Grice's maxims (no, not these maxims), the rules which make pragmatic theory tick. Put two things next to each other, and the human mind just can't help drawing a connection. Like the fact that you took the previous sentence ("Put two things...") to be a clarification of the sentence before ("... make pragmatic theory tick.") I didn't say explicitly that there was any connection at all between them, but you knew I intended it. This is obviously not a just a matter of human communication. You might say that relevance is a special case of the human proclivity for making associations, a word that in the good old days, when psychologists first became the statistic grinding lab robots we know and love, was all the rage in the theory of cognition.
Yum, Yum! Doesn't that steak look juicy? An old Aztec recipe, no doubt....
[PS. Thanks to Mark and Geoff for debugging this post.]
Posted by David Beaver at August 25, 2006 12:27 AM