The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

in western thought, which Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have called the “code model” and
the “inference model” respectively. I will here follow their exposition of these two as I
believe they apply well to the approaches in previous divination research and also because I
will use Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s Relevance Theory as my basis. 65
Already in his little book Le symbolisme en general from 1974 66 anthropologist Dan
Sperber criticized an understanding of communication, which had been prevalent for more
than 2000 years: that language was best seen as a code. According to this view a message is
encrypted in linguistic symbols by the sender and then subsequently decrypted by the
receiver (Sperber 1975: 14). This basic communication model he found among those he
termed symbolists, who were those practicing symbolic anthropology, structuralism and
Freudian psychology. According to Sperber the relation between sign and meaning is not
constant as assumed by the code model of communication (Sperber 1975: 85). He pointed out
that it was difficult to account for idiosyncratic interpretations on that model. Another
problem is how anybody could ever learn the language since it seems to be necessary to
know the code in advance in order to learn it. This criticism is followed up in Relevance:
Communication and Cognition coauthored by linguist Deirdre Wilson from 1986 (Sperber &
Wilson 1986).
The other extreme is identified as the inference model. Whereas the code model relies on
an idealized sentence, the inference model is more realistic since it is designed to understand
concrete utterances. A sentence can have a common semantic core regardless of where it is
uttered. It will nevertheless mean something different according to the context in which it is
uttered. This meaning has to be inferred. There is a common core to the sentence “I will
come tomorrow” meaning a person coming at a certain day, but the actual meaning is
dependent on who utters the sentence and when. The meaning is thus filled by inference from
the context (speaker and time) (Sperber & Wilson 1986: 10). While this model is good at
accounting for the local situational meanings of communication, it has problems accounting
for the semantic stability of sentences. Therefore Sperber and Wilson conclude that it is not
sufficient either.
65 The reason I have chosen relevance theory is not that it has solved all problems regarding communication.
Indeed there are several valid criticisms that can be raised against the original formulation (Levinson 1989),
but five aspects are in its favor: first, during the 20 years since its original formulation it has produced a solid
body of experimental evidence in its favor. Second, it connects very well with other cognitive theories such as
for example work on theory of mind (Tomasello 1999). Third, it is already the basic communication model
used in the cognitive science of religion (Boyer 2001). Fourth, it is not tied to only linguistic communication.
Fifth, the basic idea of relevance has already been applied in divination research (Abbink 1993; Zeitlyn 1990).
66 The English translation Rethinking Symbolism (Sperber 1975) is used here.
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