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Relevance is a term used to describe how pertinent, connected, or applicable some information is to a given matter. It has unique significance in a variety of fields.





Contents

1 In politics
2 In logic
3 In economics
4 In cognitive science and pragmatics
5 In Law
6 See also
7 References



In politics
During the 1960s, relevance became a fashionable buzzword, meaning roughly 'relevance to social concerns', such as racial equality, poverty, social justice, world hunger, world economic development, and so on. The implication was that some subjects, e.g., the study of medieval poetry and the practice of corporate law, were not worthwhile because they did not address pressing social issues.

In logic


Main article: relevance logic
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 systems. 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.
More recently a number of theorists have sought to account for relevance in terms of “possible world logics”. Roughly, the idea is that necessary truths are true in all possible worlds, contradictions (logical falsehoods) are true in no possible worlds, and contingent 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.
Interesting as this approach might be, it seems to have little to do with the relevance judgements made in practical problem solving.

In economics
The economist John Maynard Keynes 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 e is irrelevant to a proposition, p given old evidence q, if and only if p/q & e = p/q and relevant otherwise.
Unfortunately, there are serious technical problems with this definition, for example the relevance of piece of evidence turns out to be sensitive to the order in which all pieces of evidence were received.