5.1.4 |
RELEVANCY OR RELATEDNESS
IN OTHER DISCIPLINES |
Relevancy (or relatedness) has been recognized as a
key notion not only in analytical philosophy (which produced the
first article on this subject), but also in philosophy of
language (pragmatics), logics (relevance and relatedness
logics), philosophy of science (with a statistical model of
explanation) and in a type of sociological phenomenology.
(Phenomenology is a philosophical doctrine teaching that one can
arrive at essences, or intelligible structures in consciousness,
by a description of subjective or mental processes in which all
assumptions about the causes, consequences and wider significance
of these processes have been eliminated.)
Since the subject of relevancy is itself already being discussed in all
these fields of thought, it is not strictly necessary to show how the
notion of relevancy is used in philosophical (sub-)disciplines other than ethics.
To demonstrate the importance of relevancy it will suffice here to
have a general idea of what authors in these other fields of thought have
said before on the role of relevancy itself.
The first person ever to write a (published) article on relevancy in
particular already compared relevancy with truth and argued that it is not
truth but relevance which is the 'supreme controlling power in the making
of judgments'.
('E was also the first author to
lucidly state that 'truth is no excuse for irrelevance'.)
All reasoning ultimately depends on the notion of relevancy.
One does not assert whatever one believes to be true but 'only such a
portion of the total truth as one judges to be relevant'.
The first person ever to write a (published) book on
relevancy in particular was a phenomenologist who discovered
that 'our every action, thought and deed in the lifeworld is
guided by and founded on a whole system of relevances'. In
'er
system specific types of relevances determine 'finite provinces
of meaning'. The crucial significance of relevance in this
phenomenological theory is not different from that of a theory
in philosophy of science in which statistical relevance is
called "the key concept". Both theories will be further outlined
in the next division.
The concept of relevance has been said to be 'at the bottom
of efforts to solve central philosophical problems and to
analyze fundamental concepts'. On this view relevance is not
only a fundamental notion for philosophy but also for science
and everyday life. It has been mentioned already that linguistic
pragmatics recognizes a special maxim of relevance. It has not
yet been mentioned, however, that it has also been claimed that
this maxim is the most important one of all the maxims that
govern our conversation according to the so-called 'cooperation
principle'.
We have seen how relevancy is treated as a relational
notion in ethical theories, but when just confining oneself to
these theories, one might too readily draw the conclusion that
all notions of relevancy are of this goal-dependent sort. This
is a mistake. It turns out that some relations of relevancy are
not believed to exist between entities of a different type (one
of them being a goal or something similar), but between entities
of the same type (notably when dealing with propositions). In
the former case the relation is believed to be an asymmetrical
one between a fundament (the element in the domain) and a
terminus (the element in the range). In the latter case the
relation is symmetrical, and none of the relata would be a
focus of relevancy in the sense of a directional entity or
relational terminus. Confronted with this discrepancy in the
accounts of relevancy, we are forced to search for a possible
unity which might underly these dissimilar conceptions. For if
there really existed various entirely unconnected forms of
relevancy, we might not be justified in simply proceeding on the
assumption that the relevancy of discrimination, or, for example,
moral relevancy, is of the goal-dependent sort. This
justification is needed first.
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