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A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture 49

We might usefully think of Background as a set of assumptions and practices that
maintains a fairly steady degree of not very high manifestness, across time, in an in-
dividual’s cognitive environment. A subset of the Background consists in assump-
tions/practices which make up the mutual cognitive environment of all (non-patho-
logical) human beings – the deep Background; other subsets are the mutual cognitive
environments of what can loosely be termed culturally defined groups of human
beings – local Backgrounds.
Carston (2002: 68)

Background is a useful technical term in that it identifies a subset of the inter-
locutors’ presumed shared beliefs which play an important role in communi-
cation. For example, if any of the Background assumptions do not hold, the
speaker should indicate this clearly. Failure to do so inevitably goes against the
Principle of Relevance. Consider Example (8):

(8) Mary: I saw Peter yesterday.

Given our Background knowledge about people, it would not be rational for
Mary to say: I saw Peter yesterday in order to convey the idea that she saw parts
of Peter scattered round the room. According to the Principle of Relevance, the
hearer is entitled to treat certain assumptions about the physical properties of
people as taken for granted. These Background assumptions are not communi-
cated, because they are already (presumed) held at maximal strength. Therefore,
they do not need to be represented consciously in a given situation of communi-
cation.
Many cultural representations are an important part of the local (i.e. cul-
tural) Background. They too are generally mutually manifest to the members of
particular groups. They can be, and often are, taken for granted in communi-
cation between people who presume that they belong in the same culture. These
cultural representations tend to be so intuitive to those who hold them that they
often appear natural, rather than conventional, so they too are seldom consciously
represented. That is why they are typically the loci of miscommunication in
situations of inter-cultural communication, which suggests that cross-cultural
training should focus primarily on the differences between the trainee’s and the
host group’s local Backgrounds.
In light of these observations, the notions of cognitive environment and mu-
tual cognitive environment can be related to cultural knowledge as follows:
Cultural environment (of an individual)
The set of cultural representations which are manifest to an individual at a given
time.
(In other words, the proper subset of an individual’s cognitive environment which
consists only of cultural representations.)