Relevance is the concept of one topic being
connected
Connected may refer to:
Film and television
* ''Connected'' (2008 film), a Hong Kong remake of the American movie ''Cellular''
* '' Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology'', a 2011 documentary film
* ''Connected'' (2015 TV ...
to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first. The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sciences, logic, and
library and information science
Library and information science(s) or studies (LIS) is an interdisciplinary field of study that deals generally with organization, access, collection, and protection/regulation of information, whether in physical (e.g. art, legal proceedings, e ...
. Most fundamentally, however, it is studied in
epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Episte ...
(the theory of knowledge). Different theories of knowledge have different implications for what is considered relevant and these fundamental views have implications for all other fields as well.
Definition
"Something (A) is relevant to a task (T) if it increases the likelihood of accomplishing the goal (G), which is implied by T." (Hjørland & Sejer Christensen, 2002).
A thing might be relevant, a document or a piece of information may be relevant. The basic understanding of relevance does not depend on whether we speak of "things" or "information". For example, the Gandhian principles are of great relevance in today's world.
Epistemology
If you believe that
schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social withdra ...
is caused by bad communication between mother and child, then family interaction studies become relevant. If, on the other hand, you subscribe to a genetic theory of relevance then the study of genes becomes relevant. If you subscribe to the epistemology of empiricism, then only intersubjectively controlled observations are relevant. If, on the other hand, you subscribe to
feminist epistemology, then the sex of the observer becomes relevant.
Epistemology is not just one domain among others. Epistemological views are always at play in any domain. Those views determine or influence what is regarded relevant.
Logic
![Relevance](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Relevance.jpg)
In formal reasoning, relevance has proved an important but elusive concept. It is important because the solution of any problem requires the prior identification of the relevant elements from which a solution can be constructed. It is elusive, because the meaning of relevance appears to be difficult or impossible to capture within conventional
logical system
A formal system is an abstract structure used for inferring theorems from axioms according to a set of rules. These rules, which are used for carrying out the inference of theorems from axioms, are the logical calculus of the formal system.
A form ...
s. The obvious suggestion that q is relevant to p if q is implied by p breaks down because under standard definitions of
material implication, a false proposition implies all other propositions. However though 'iron is a metal' may be implied by 'cats lay eggs' it doesn't seem to be relevant to it the way in which 'cats are mammals' and 'mammals give birth to living young' are relevant to each other. If one states "I love ice cream," and another person responds "I have a friend named Brad Cook," then these statements are not relevant. However, if one states "I love ice cream," and another person responds "I have a friend named Brad Cook who also likes ice cream," this statement now becomes relevant because it relates to the first person's idea.
Another proposal defines relevance or, more accurately, irrelevance information-theoretically.
It is easiest to state in terms of variables, which might reflect the values of measurable hypotheses or observation statements. The conditional entropy of an observation variable e conditioned on a variable h characterizing alternative hypotheses provides a measure of the irrelevance of the observation variable e to the set of competing hypotheses characterized by h. It is useful combined with measures of the information content of the variable e in terms of its entropy. One can then subtract the content of e that is irrelevant to h (given by its conditional entropy conditioned on h) from the total information content of e (given by its entropy) to calculate the amount of information the variable e contains about the set of hypotheses characterized by h. Relevance (via the concept of irrelevance) and information content then characterize the observation variable and can be used to measure its sensitivity and specificity (respectively) as a test for alternative hypotheses.
More recently a number of theorists have sought to account for relevance in terms of "
possible world
A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional logic, intensional and mod ...
logics" in
intensional logic
Intensional logic is an approach to predicate logic that extends first-order logic, which has quantifiers that range over the individuals of a universe (''extensions''), by additional quantifiers that range over terms that may have such individuals ...
. Roughly, the idea is that
necessary truth
Logical truth is one of the most fundamental concepts in logic. Broadly speaking, a logical truth is a statement which is true regardless of the truth or falsity of its constituent propositions. In other words, a logical truth is a statement whic ...
s are true in all possible worlds,
contradiction
In traditional logic, a contradiction occurs when a proposition conflicts either with itself or established fact. It is often used as a tool to detect disingenuous beliefs and bias. Illustrating a general tendency in applied logic, Aristotle's ...
s (logical falsehoods) are true in no possible worlds, and
contingent
Contingency or Contingent may refer to:
* Contingency (philosophy), in philosophy and logic
* Contingency plan, in planning
* Contingency table, in statistics
* Contingency theory, in organizational theory
* Contingency theory (biology) in evoluti ...
propositions can be ordered in terms of the number of possible worlds in which they are true. Relevance is argued to depend upon the "remoteness relationship" between an actual world in which relevance is being evaluated and the set of possible worlds within which it is true.
Application
Cognitive science and pragmatics
In 1986,
Dan Sperber
Dan Sperber (born 20 June 1942 in Cagnes-sur-Mer) is a French social and cognitive scientist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and phil ...
and Deirdre Wilson drew attention to the central importance of relevance decisions in reasoning and communication. They proposed an account of the process of inferring relevant information from any given utterance. To do this work, they used what they called the "Principle of Relevance": namely, the position that ''any utterance addressed to someone automatically conveys the presumption of its own optimal relevance''. The central idea of Sperber and Wilson's theory is that all utterances are encountered in some context, and the correct interpretation of a particular utterance is the one that allows most new implications to be made in that context on the basis of the least amount of information necessary to convey it. For Sperber and Wilson, relevance is conceived as relative or subjective, as it depends upon the state of knowledge of a hearer when they encounter an utterance.
Sperber and Wilson stress that this theory is not intended to account for every intuitive application of the English word "relevance". Relevance, as a technical term, is restricted to relationships between utterances and interpretations, and so the theory cannot account for intuitions such as the one that relevance relationships obtain in problems involving physical objects. If a plumber needs to fix a leaky faucet, for example, some objects and tools are relevant (e.g. a wrench) and others are not (e.g. a waffle iron). And, moreover, the latter seems to be irrelevant in a manner which does not depend upon the plumber's knowledge, or the utterances used to describe the problem.
A theory of relevance that seems to be more readily applicable to such instances of physical problem solving has been suggested by Gorayska and Lindsay in a series of articles published during the 1990s. The key feature of their theory is the idea that relevance is goal-dependent. An item (e.g., an utterance or object) is relevant to a goal if and only if it can be an essential element of some plan capable of achieving the desired goal. This theory embraces both propositional reasoning and the problem-solving activities of people such as plumbers, and defines relevance in such a way that what is relevant is determined by the real world (because what plans will work is a matter of empirical fact) rather than the state of knowledge or belief of a particular problem solver.
Economics
The
economist
An economist is a professional and practitioner in the social sciences, social science discipline of economics.
The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this ...
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in ...
saw the importance of defining relevance to the problem of calculating risk in economic decision-making. He suggested that the relevance of a piece of evidence, such as a true proposition, should be defined in terms of the changes it produces of estimations of the probability of future events. Specifically, Keynes proposed that new evidence
is irrelevant to a proposition
, given old evidence
, if and only if
, otherwise, the proposition is relevant.
There are technical problems with this definition, for example, the relevance of a piece of evidence can be sensitive to the order in which other pieces of evidence are received.
Law
The meaning of "relevance" in U.S. law is reflected in Rule 401 of the
Federal Rules of Evidence
First adopted in 1975, the Federal Rules of Evidence codify the evidence law that applies in United States federal courts. In addition, many states in the United States have either adopted the Federal Rules of Evidence, with or without local v ...
. That rule defines relevance as "having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determinations of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence." In other words, if a fact were to have no bearing on the truth or falsity of a conclusion, it would be legally irrelevant.
Library and information science
This field has considered when documents (or document representations) retrieved from databases are relevant or non-relevant. Given a conception of relevance, two measures have been applied:
Precision and recall:
Recall = a : (a + c) X 100%, where
a = number of retrieved, relevant documents,
c = number of non-retrieved, relevant documents (sometimes termed "silence").
Recall is thus an expression of how exhaustive a search for documents is.
Precision = a : (a + b) X 100%, where
a = number of retrieved, relevant documents,
b = number of retrieved, non-relevant documents (often termed "noise").
Precision is thus a measure of the amount of noise in document-retrieval.
Relevance itself has in the literature often been based on what is termed "the system's view" and "the user's view". Hjørland (2010) criticize these two views and defends a "subject knowledge view of relevance".
Politics
During the 1960s, ''relevance'' became a fashionable
buzzword
A buzzword is a word or phrase, new or already existing, that becomes popular for a period of time. Buzzwords often derive from technical terms yet often have much of the original technical meaning removed through fashionable use, being simply used ...
, meaning roughly 'relevance to social concerns', such as
racial equality
Racial equality is a situation in which people of all races and ethnicities are treated in an egalitarian/equal manner. Racial equality occurs when institutions give individuals legal, moral, and political rights. In present-day Western societ ...
,
poverty
Poverty is the state of having few material possessions or little income. Poverty can have diverse social, economic, and political causes and effects. When evaluating poverty in ...
,
social justice
Social justice is justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. In Western and Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fu ...
,
world hunger
Malnutrition occurs when an organism gets too few or too many nutrients, resulting in health problems. Specifically, it is "a deficiency, excess, or imbalance of energy, protein and other nutrients" which adversely affects the body's tissue ...
, world
economic development
In the economics study of the public sector, economic and social development is the process by which the economic well-being and quality of life of a nation, region, local community, or an individual are improved according to targeted goals and o ...
, and so on. The implication was that some subjects, e.g., the study of
medieval poetry
Poetry took numerous forms in medieval Europe, for example, lyric and epic poetry. The troubadours and the minnesänger are known for their lyric poetry about courtly love.
Among the most famous of secular poetry is ''Carmina Burana'', a manuscr ...
and the practice of
corporate law, were not worthwhile because they did not address pressing
social issues.
See also
*
Source criticism
*
Description
Description is the pattern of narrative development that aims to make vivid a place, object, character, or group. Description is one of four rhetorical modes (also known as ''modes of discourse''), along with exposition, argumentation, and narr ...
*
Distraction
Distraction is the process of diverting the attention of an individual or group from a desired area of focus and thereby blocking or diminishing the reception of desired information. Distraction is caused by: the lack of ability to pay attentio ...
*
Information-action ratio
*
Information overload
*
Intention
*
Intuitionistic logic
Intuitionistic logic, sometimes more generally called constructive logic, refers to systems of symbolic logic that differ from the systems used for classical logic by more closely mirroring the notion of constructive proof. In particular, systems ...
*
Kripke semantics
Kripke semantics (also known as relational semantics or frame semantics, and often confused with possible world semantics) is a formal semantics for non-classical logic systems created in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Saul Kripke and André Jo ...
*
Relevance theory
Relevance theory is a framework for understanding the interpretation of utterances. It was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and is used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The theory was originally inspired by the work of ...
*
Rubled
References
* Gorayska B. & R. O. Lindsay (1993). The Roots of Relevance. ''Journal of Pragmatics'' ''19'', 301–323. Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press.
* Hjørland, Birger (2010)
The foundation of the concept of relevance Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(2), 217-237.
* Keynes, J. M. (1921). ''Treatise on Probability''. London: MacMillan
* Lindsay, R. & Gorayska, B. (2002) Relevance, Goals and Cognitive Technology. ''International Journal of Cognitive Technology'', ''1'', (2), 187–232
* Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1986/1995) ''Relevance: Communication and Cognition''. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
* Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1987). Précis of Relevance: Communication and Cognition. ''Behavioral and Brain Science'', ''10'', 697–754.
* Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (2004). Relevance Theory. In Horn, L.R. & Ward, G. (eds.) 2004 The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, 607-632. http://www.dan.sperber.fr/?p=93
* Zhang, X, H. (1993). ''A Goal-Based Relevance Model and its Application to Intelligent Systems''. Ph.D. Thesis, Oxford Brookes University, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, October, 1993.
External links
Malcolm Gladwell - Blink - full show TVOntario
TVO Media Education Group (often abbreviated as TVO and stylized on-air as tvo) is a publicly funded English-language educational television network and media organization serving the Canadian province of Ontario. It is operated by the Ontario ...
interview regarding "snap judgements" and ''
Blink''
{{Philosophical logic
Information science
Library science terminology
Pragmatics
Logic
Descriptive technique