The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

humans communicate by producing signs which have the goal of making thoughts known to
the interpreter. These signs are recognized as communicative by the interpreter and
interpreted according to the relevance principle, thereby extracting the information initially
intended by the communicator.
In divination, then, the HIDD is activated by the ritualized action. This indicates an
intention behind the signs. Because of the question initially formulated, the interpreter will
further identify these signs as having a communicative intention. The informative intention is
found by the principle of relevance with the aid of the different possible meanings of the
signs produced and the context determined by the motivation of the questioner.
Restricted symbol system
Although the basic principles of communication are used in divination there are also
important differences. A divinatory sign system differs from a linguistic sign-system in
several different ways. A normal English speaker knows between 30000 and 60000 different
words. In comparison the richest divination system, the West African Ifa 69 , operates with 256
different signs (Bascom 1969) and the simplest operate with two different signs such as for
example the poison oracle among the Azande (Evans-Pritchard 1937). It is obvious that the
system is much more restricted with regard to the number of signs than normal language.
This connects well with another aspect that differs from normal communication. The
relation between a sign and its meaning is less firm; it is less “coded” than words typically
are. More meanings are attached to the individual symbols. This implies that a lot extra
“inference” will have to take place on the part of the interpreter. An example of the
multiplicity of meanings can be seen from Victor Turners fieldwork among the Ndembu. In
Ndembu basket divination a number of symbolic objects are contained in a basket and from
their configuration the information sought can be interpreted. Turner asked his informants
about what the individual symbols meant. For the symbol yipwepu, which is physically
on Chimpanzees from 1978 by psychologist David Premack and primatologist Guy Woodruff (Premack &
Woodruff 1978). This was turned into a problem of human psychology by the philosopher Daniel Dennett in
the commentary to the article. Here he suggested, what would later become known as, the false belief test
(although he called it mistaken belief) (Dennett 1978: 569). This test illuminated the principle of people
having beliefs about other people’s beliefs and has had central significance for the development of the Theory
of Mind research in developmental psychology, meta-cognition and autism (Baron-Cohen 1995; Gopnik &
Astington 1988; Leslie 1994; Premack 1990; Tomasello et al. 2005). In recent years the field has seen an
explosive expansion.
69 It should be mentioned that the so called rhapsodomantic practices where a section of text is the sign, seem
to be exceptions (Petersen 2007). The same can be said of ecstatic or oracular divination forms. These forms
simply use language as their sign system.
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