Even if one agrees on the relational nature of relevancy and on the general connections between its diverse forms, there is a number of conceptual issues about which there still might be some uncertainty. The questions we will discuss in this division are:

1. isn't relevancy redundant?
2. if not, is it a formal or substantive concept?
3. is it an objective or subjective concept?
4. is it of a factual-modal or normative character?
5. is it a wholly consequentialistic concept?

Whenever possible, we shall compare a conceptual question about relevancy with an analogous question about truth. This is not to suggest that the answer must be the same or analogous, but that one should have good reasons for an answer which is fundamentally different. We are not the only ones to thus compare relevancy with truth. It has been said before, for example, that 'relatedness, like truth, is a primitive notion'. Looking at it the other way around, it may be interesting to ask certain questions about relevancy which traditionally have only been posed about truth. The question whether relevancy might be redundant is of this sort, and will be considered first here.

Just as some philosophers (but no human in the street) regard true as redundant, so it might indeed theoretically be possible to dispose of relevant. In the same way as a (truth-)redundancy theorist maintains that true and false can be eliminated from all contexts without semantic loss, a 'redundancy theorist of relevancy' might argue that, instead of "relevantly similar" and "relevantly different", one could as well read "similar" and "different". After all, similar, and also equal, have another meaning than identical: it is always equal in one or more particular respects (and the meaning of different varies with it). In the strict sense relevant is redundant in relevant reason as well, because a reason is only a reason if it is relevant. And the other way around: a reason is a relevant fact or other condition, or a relevant consideration. The only meaning appropriately given to all these phrases would have to fulfil the criterion of relevance anyhow, one might say. (Similarly, <it is raining> is true is no different from it is raining, if uttered at the right time and place.)

Altho the whole idea of redundancy may seem farfetched, it is no coincidence that it has been remarked that 'is relevant to behaves very much like is similar to'. It is no coincidence either that many ordinary language users do indeed mean by similar and different, relevantly similar and different, by reason, a relevant reason and by making a distinction or discriminating in a meliorative sense making a relevant distinction. But now, a redundancy theorist, too, must admit that making distinctions in a condemnatory sense means making irrelevant distinctions. This existence of deviations from the norm proves that relevancy (and also truth) might be superfluous in a perfect world in which everyone makes relevant distinctions only (and tells the truth only), but that it is a useful notion in the 'substandard' real world in which people actually live, and so long as irrelevant distinctions can be made (and propositions falsely uttered ). Making relevancy formally redundant would merely shift the problem from the denotational sphere --what is relevancy?-- to the connotational sphere --is the word distinction used in a meliorative or condemnatory sense, and why?--. A formal redundancy of relevancy would merely envelop the whole issue in an even denser mist, and this opinion seems to be explicitly or implicitly shared by all those who have reflected upon relevancy itself, or who take it that their employment of relevant or irrelevant is meaningful.