The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

efutations. With this article Zeitlyn shows that contradictions are not refutations. This makes
the problem behind the rationality debate evaporate. Instead of logic dominating thought and
dialogue it is instead the Gricean relevance principle (cf. Grice 2001).
Jon Abbink (Abbink 1993) has also worked with the relevance principle, but in the form of
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s cognitive relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986).
Abbink also considers divination a form of dialogue, but one in which a lot of the
communication is not explicit. With the help of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory he
shows how, for example, pointing is just as communicative as speaking. Whereas Zeitlyn
acknowledged that a dialogue with divination was taking place, Abbink simply treats the
dialogue between the ones present.
Pascal Boyer’s ideas are related to Zeitlyn’s whom he also quotes. He started his attack on
anthropology in general and cultural anthropology in particular in 1990 with Tradition as
Truth and Communication (Boyer 1990). In this book he proposes a new cognitive view on
divination. The focus for Boyer is how divination constitutes a truth making procedure
(Boyer 1990: 61). Boyer finds that in divination the truth is not a function of people thinking
about it as stemming from a god or ancestor, as there is evidence of the contrary, for example
among the Azande where no gods or ancestors are thought to be communicating. Instead
people implicitly make a causal link between the situation at hand and the divinatory
diagnosis. Thus divinatory speech differs from ordinary speech in that people think of it as
directly caused by the situations represented in the same way we think a photograph is
directly caused by the situation represented (Boyer 1990: 78).
An interesting aspect is that Boyer in his theory separates the mental representations at
work in the ritual and the ones in discourse about divination. This makes it possible to
explain why some people have elaborate theories of how divination works, but don’t follow
them in practice. More importantly it renders the question of collective representations and
secondary elaborations extrinsic to the truth production of divination, whereas previous
research with the possible exception of Zeitlyn tried to explain divination’s truth production
as a function of secondary elaborations blocking the refutation of the system.
Summary
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