Relevance Bridges the Gap Between Fact and Value

The is-ought distinction — the supposed gap between descriptive facts and evaluative norms — has long been treated as a foundational boundary in philosophy. Relevance, however, refuses to respect it. Relevance is not a mind-independent property of information, yet it is not reducible to subjective preference either, because relevance judgments are self-correcting. The statement "I should have attended to that" presupposes a normative standard that transcends momentary inclination. This self-corrective structure reveals that the epistemic machinery (how we form knowledge) and the evaluative machinery (how we assign significance) are not parallel systems but deeply interdependent and mutually constituting.

Bernard Williams's notion of thick concepts — terms like "courage," "cruelty," or "wisdom" that are simultaneously descriptive and evaluative — captures something of this entanglement. But the insight here goes further. Relevance is not merely a thick concept; it is the pre-conceptual condition that enables any concept, thick or thin, to function. Before a concept can describe or evaluate, something must have already been selected as worth attending to. Relevance realization is the process that makes conceptual activity possible in the first place, and it is inherently normative.

This has profound implications for ontology and cognitive science alike. If Relevance realization is both the ground of epistemic contact with reality and an irreducibly normative act, then the clean separation of fact and value is not just philosophically questionable — it is operationally impossible. Development and transformation, on this account, can be understood as the progressive coupling of relevance to realness: the ongoing calibration of what we find salient with what is genuinely there.