text: what is relevance theory? sperber and wilson created the theory of relevance but i cant get my head around what it is pls help!! relevance theory is a proposal (by dan sperber and deirdre wilson) that seeks to explain the second method of communication: implicit inferences. it argues that the human mind will instinctively react to an encoded message by considering information that it conceives to be relevant to the message. by "relevance" it is meant whatever allows the most new information to be transmitted in that context on the basis of the least amount of effort required to convey it.