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A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture 43

general theory. Instead, descriptions and explanations in the social-cultural do-
main ought to be concerned with the study of the distribution of various cultural
categories (e.g. artefacts, genres, art forms, “codes” of behaviour, etc.) in the
context of a handful of fairly simple universal cognitive mechanisms and of
myriad ecological factors. To give but one example, we are used to thinking of
carrots as being of an orangey colour. In fact, the orange carrot is largely a cul-
tural innovation which originated in Holland only several centuries ago, when
the Dutch made their national colour the colour of the carrot. Before that time
carrots, apparently, used to be of a dark-purplish hue. But this is not sufficient to
explain the lasting (cross)-cultural success of this designer vegetable. It seems
plausible to assume that our biological disposition to associate some colours,
such as orange, with edible things, more readily than others, such as dark-
purple, is a universal psychological factor which most likely played an import-
ant role in the appeal of orangey carrots to people. Of course, the cross-cultural
success of the orange carrot also owes a great deal to other ecological factors,
including cultural achievements, such as the advent of fairly effective means of
transportation, international travel, and so on. In other words, orangey carrots
were successful because they were persistently intuitively perceived as more
desirable than their purplish ancestors, and because their production and trans-
portation were relatively economical. This is a general point: successful cultural
things are those which preserve an appreciable degree of perceived relevance in
relatively large human populations over relatively significant time spans.
Clearly, the term relevance can be used as a measure of (likely) cultural success
only provided it is given explicit theoretical content.

4. Relevance in cognition

The stability of representations over time and their geographical distribution
owe much to a general functional feature of human cognition: its orientation to-
wards improving the belief system of individuals. If this is indeed a major func-
tion of human cognition, then it should be characterized in terms of an efficiency
measure, a cost benefit relation of some sort. This is true of any thing that has a
function, as the following analogy with purposeful artefacts illustrates:
Efficiency is some measure of benefit divided by cost. The benefit of a pot could be
measured as the quantity of water that it holds. Cost can conveniently be measured in
equivalent units: the quantity of material of the pot itself. Efficiency might be defined
as the volume of water that a pot can hold divided by the volume of material that goes
to make the pot itself.
Dawkins (1996: 7)