On Relevance: Why Legitimate Coordination Cannot Be Reduced to Optimization

This paper addresses a persistent problem in political and social philosophy: how coordination can be legitimate in plural systems where no final authority is available, accepted, or justifiable. Existing approaches—whether grounded in optimization, aggregation, consensus, procedure, or authority—repeatedly fail under conditions of deep and durable disagreement. This failure, the paper argues, is not contingent or merely practical, but structural. The central claim is that relevance, rather than preference, value aggregation, or outcome selection, is the correct organizing concept for legitimate coordination under pluralism. Relevance is not treated as a matter of salience, moral priority, or epistemic correctness. Instead, it is developed as a structural property of constraint systems: a constraint is relevant if and only if it can bind plural agents without presupposing authority, privileging a standpoint, or collapsing coordination into outcome selection. The paper advances a non selective account of legitimacy, showing that legitimate coordination operates through constraint filtering rather than decision closure. It argues that constraints are legitimate only insofar as they preserve standing, respect symmetry, avoid escalation, and remain compatible with non selection. Any constraint that selects a unique outcome thereby reintroduces final authority and forfeits legitimacy under plural conditions. This work is strictly philosophical in method and scope. It does not present a formal system or computational model. However, it is written as part of an intentional chain of validation. The arguments developed here provide the conceptual and normative foundation for a separate formal axiomatization—Standing Algebra—which demonstrates that the structural commitments defended philosophically in this paper entail non determinacy and rule out outcome selection as a matter of formal consequence. Together with the broader monograph On Relevance: The Social Physics of Pluralism, this paper occupies an intermediate position: it neither asserts philosophical claims without structural discipline nor presents formal results without interpretive grounding. The contribution of this paper is therefore twofold. Substantively, it offers a rigorous account of relevance as the structural basis of legitimacy without resolution. Methodologically, it shows why formalization is necessary to secure such claims against equivocation, while also demonstrating why formalization alone is insufficient without philosophical interpretation. The result is a framework that explains not how plural systems should be resolved, but why legitimate coordination is possible only without resolution at all.