Abstract: 

What is it for a bit of information to be relevant to an agent at a particular time? We [me and my colleague, Daniel Drucker] offer an answer to this question that helps to unify recent work in the semantics and pragmatics of questions with more general issues concerning our practical and theoretical interests. Moreover, we argue that our favored account of cognitive relevance provides the basis for a plausible story concerning conversational relevance that differs in important and interesting ways from that of Roberts’ (2012) justly influential picture of discourse, information structure, and questions under discussion. Along the way, we show why any theorist who is tempted to seriously appeal to relevance - be it in pragmatics, epistemology, moral theory, etc.. - should exercise caution. If our account is even roughly on the right track, it will very often be indeterminate whether a bit of information is relevant to you or the conversation in which you are engaged; and even in those cases in which it is clearly relevant, that fact might be far from epistemically transparent to you (or anyone else).