pertinency

Pertinency is the quality or state of being pertinent, meaning relevant or applicable to a given matter. It describes how directly information, arguments, or actions bear on an issue, question, or goal. Because judgments of relevance can depend on context and purpose, discussions of pertinency often focus on the standards or criteria used to judge usefulness.

In law, pertinency (often used interchangeably with relevance) concerns whether evidence is sufficiently related to the facts at issue to be admissible or persuasive. Some contexts distinguish pertinency as the direct or material influence a piece of evidence has on the outcome, whereas broader discussions may simply use relevance to describe any connection to the matter at hand.

In philosophy and logic, pertinency is used to analyze relevance relations between premises and conclusions. A premise is considered to have pertinency to a conclusion if it meaningfully supports or makes the conclusion plausible within the given argument.

In information science and data analysis, pertinency can describe how well data or results match a specific query or objective. Measures of pertinency or relevance guide tasks such as search, recommendation, and evidence synthesis.

Etymology traces pertinency to Latin pertinere, “to pertain,” with the suffixes that yield the English terms pertinence and pertinency. The word is closely related to, but distinct from, pertinence and relevance, with subtle emphasis on direct applicability or material bearing on a matter.

See also: relevance, pertinence, applicability, topicality.