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<Paper uid="P86-1035">
  <Title>COMMONSENSE METAPHYSICS AND LEXICAL SEMANTICS</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="237" end_page="238" 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&amp;quot; and by &amp;quot;normative&amp;quot;. 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&amp;quot;. If a bit of material z is a sample of another bit of material y, then x 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 x 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&amp;quot;, will be true of all of the lube oil as well, and that this will give information about possible 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&amp;quot;. 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 a 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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