Relevance

• Applicant: Dr. Stephan Krämer
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 347428833

Distinctions between what is relevant and what is not are ubiquitous, they pervade every-day thought and talk as much as scientific and philosophical debates. In some cases, relevance is a mostly pragmatic or psychological matter, e.g. of how efficiently an agent’s cognitive state is influenced by a piece of information. In other cases, a more abstract, semantic connection is intended, which obtains independently of our capacity to recognize and efficiently process it. Relevance in this latter sense is the topic of the proposed project.The project so far has focussed on logical, epistemic, explanatory relevance relations. Our results provide significant support for our following working hypotheses: (i) Relevance is a hyperintensional phenomenon, i.e. even necessarily equivalent statements can differ in terms of what they are relevant to, (ii) truthmaker semantics is well suited to serve as a powerful and unified framework for the formal study of relevance relations, and (iii) in the areas we considered, relevance is a unified phenomenon at least in the sense that many considerations and insights apply across the different fields, so that work on different relevance relations can mutually inform one another and be fruitfully pursued in a collaborative environment.During the sixth year, for which we are here requesting funding, we will primarily be pursuing three subprojects, each extending the scope of the original project in a direction that our work so far has revealed as significant and promising.Models and Methodology. A central theoretical tool in our work consists in hyperintensional formal models of propositional contents and their logical properties. Timothy Williamson has recently argued that by ordinary scientific standards employed for model-building in the natural and social sciences, such models appear problematic. We will show, firstly, that Williamson’s particular use of the pertinent criteria is questionable and misleading, and then build a positive case for hyperintensional models on the basis of a more thorough, comparative analysis of the relevant models in philosophy and the sciences.Normative Reasons and their Weights. Extending the range of relevance relations under consideration, we will also turn to normative forms of relevance, and in particular the category of practical reasons for action. The goal here is to develop a theory and a formal model of normative reasons that adequately captures the idea of a reason’s relative weight as well as the balancing of reasons in accordance with their respective weights.Explanation and Understanding. We will, firstly, extend our account of explanations of facts and events to the special case of action-explanation, and secondly, complement it by a novel theory of explanation-generated understanding whose distinctive advantage as compared to extant approaches is that it is also plausible in application to metaphysical explanations.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups