5.2 |
THE DIVERSITY OF THE NOTIONS OF RELEVANCY |
5.2.1 |
LINGUISTIC, LOGICAL AND STATISTICAL NOTIONS |
When the maxim be relevant was formulated for the first
time as part of a cooperation principle governing people's
conversations, it was already clear that its terse formulation
concealed a number of problems, such as questions about what
different kinds of focuses of relevance there might be. Thus it
was not much later that in an article on conversational
relevancy a distinction was suggested between 'pragmatic' and
'semantic' relevancy, the former being goal-dependent, the
latter referring to a symmetrical relationship. Pragmatic
relevance is, then, defined as the relevance of speech acts
to certain goals and must be considered as a 'specialization of
the general notion of relevance of an action to a goal' (part of
the theory of goal-directed behavior). Semantic relevance is
said to be 'the relevance of certain linguistic, logical or
cognitive entities (propositions) to other entities of the same
type'. As the concepts which it involves have been mentioned
reference, entailment and meaning relations.
The 'pragmatic' and 'semantic relevancy' of philosophy of
language have been called "practical" and "semantic relatedness"
in logics. So one logician speaks of "the practical relatedness
of events and actions" and "the semantic relatedness of the
subject-matters of propositions". (Another logician writes that
relatedness is only chosen instead of relevance because
of its different technical meaning in relevance logics.) There is
accordingly no essential difference between pragmatic and semantic
relevancy in philosophy of language on the one hand and
practical and semantic relatedness on the other.
Authors who do not distinguish a symmetrical from an a- or
non-symmetrical relevancy relation simply presuppose that all
relevancy is of the goal-dependent kind like pragmatic relevancy
and practical relatedness. The first philosopher to publish an
article on relevancy wrote already that the relevance of a thing
'lies in its value for us and in our attitude towards it'.
Whether something is relevant depends 'on the purpose of the
moment', and one must not turn 'the usefulness of things for our
purposes into an attribute of the things in themselves', into 'a
quality residing in the thing thought of per se'. (Relevance
implies a relation to a purpose 'by its very etymology' this
author said.) The goal-dependent character of the relevancy
notion is less clear, but certainly present too in the first
author to write on relevancy from a phenomenological point of view.
'E
speaks about everyone's 'system of relevances' being
determined by one's 'interest at hand'. This interest 'motivates
all one's thinking, projecting, acting, and therewith establishes
the problems to be solved by one's thought and the goals
to be attained by one's actions'. The concept of goal is closely
related to that of value, and consequently it is not surprising
that the same author has claimed that a theory of relevances (or
of 'topical relevances', to be precise) will contribute to 'a
classification of the concept of value', that is, to a classification
of the values by which one wants to be guided in one's
theoretical and practical life. When later theorists point out
that it is useful to talk of utterances, and to see them 'as
being relevant to previous utterances, a discourse, a question,
an issue or a goal' it is clearly goal-dependent or pragmatic
relevancy again they are thinking of.
Relevancy has not only been subdivided into a pragmatic and a
semantic type in philosophy of language. A further subdivision
in that discipline is that into topical, marginal and potential
relevance. 'Topical relevance' is what is said to be at the
center of the subject's field of attention at time t; 'marginal
relevance' is everything that is still somewhere in the
subject's field of attention, but in
'er horizon; and 'potential
relevance' is said to concern the members of a domain of stored
data which might be referred to as "the background for S at t".
What is particularly interesting about this classification is
its similarity with a phenomenological subdivision to be discussed
in the next section. This will be another confirmation of
the fact that philosophers in different fields of inquiry have
not seldom categorized the types of relevancy in ways which
highly resembled each other. And this, in turn, will be a clear
indication that there is indeed a unity in the diversity of
relevancy notions.
But before turning to phenomenology we should first have a
brief look at a conception of relevancy of quite a different
complexion which has been developed in philosophy of science. In
the theory in question a factor is said to be statistically
relevant to the occurrence of an event if it makes a difference
to the probability of that occurrence. Facts can be statistically
relevant on this view even in the absence of high probability,
since both the probability with and the probability without a
particular property may be low. If they are not equally low, a
property is statistically relevant nevertheless, whereas it
would be irrelevant if both probabilities were high, but equally
high. This relation of statistical relevancy is said to be
symmetrical. The rule is to choose the broadest homogeneous
reference class to which a single event belongs. Yet, it
has been admitted that this formulation may not remove 'all
ambiguities about the selection of reference classes either in
principle or in practise'. If the explanation is causal (instead
of symptomatic), this provides a more homogeneous reference
class, and --it has been argued-- 'each progressively
better partitioning makes the preceding partitioning
statistically irrelevant'.
The notion of statistical relevancy seems to be subjected to
a rather stringent procedure, and to be little belief-dependent
or not belief-dependent at all. In spite of this, the philosopher
of science or the scientist cannot guarantee either that a
partitioning at any time is the best one, nor that the selection
of reference classes is in no way arbitrary or merely traditional.
Without any change in the external world (or nonpropositional
reality) something that is 'statistically relevant' today
may be 'statistically irrelevant' tomorrow. But this means that
the notion of statistical relevance is knowledge-dependent, and
in that sense not objective either. At the most it is of some
epistemic nature.
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