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<Paper uid="H86-1013">
  <Title>COMMONSENSE METAPHYSICS AND LEXICAL SEMANTICS</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="133" end_page="134" type="evalu">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Relevance and the Normative
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Many of the concepts we are investigating have driven us inexorably to the problems of what is meant by &amp;quot;relevant* and by &amp;quot;normative*. We do not pretend to have solved these problems. But for each of these concepts we do have the beginnings of an account that can play a role in analysis, if not yet in implementation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Our view of relevance, briefly stated, is that something is relevant to some goal if it is a part of a plan to achieve that goal. \[A formal treatment of a similar view is given in Davies and Russell, 1986.) We can illustrate this with an example involving the word &amp;quot;sample*. If a bit of material z is a sample of another bit of material y, then z is a part of y, and moreover, there are relevant properties p and q such that it is believed that if p is true of z then q is true of y. That is, looking at the properties of the sample tells us something important about the properties of the whole.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Frequently, p and q are the same property. In our target texts, the following sentence occurs:  We retained an oil sample for future inspection.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The oil in the sample is a part of the total lube oil in the lube oil system, and it is believed that a property of the sample, such as &amp;quot;contaminated with metal particles', will be true of all of the lube oil as well, and that this will give information about po~ible wear on the bearings. It is therefore relevant to the goal of maintaining the machinery in good working order.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> We have arrived at the following provisional account of what it means to be &amp;quot;normative'. For an entity to exhibit a normative condition or behavior, it must first of all be a component of a larger system. This system has structure in the form of relations among its components. A pattern is a property of the system, namely, the property of * subset of these stuctural relations holding. A norm is a pattern which is established either by conventional stipulation or by statistical regularity. An entity is behaving in a normative fashion if it is a component of a system and instantiates a norm within that system. The word &amp;quot;operate&amp;quot; given above illustrates this. When we say that an engine is operating, we have in mind a larger system, the device the engine drives, to which the engine may bear various possible relations. A subset of these relations is stipulated to be the norm--the way it is supposed to work. We say it is operating when it is instantiating this norm.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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