Speaker Series: Ruth Chang (Rutgers)

“The Structure of Value”

Ruth Chang

It is commonly assumed that values have a ‘trichotomous’ structure, that is, that values can relate items only by one item being better, worse, or equal to another with respect to that value. Why should we believe that value is trichotomous? I critically explore some intuitive arguments for trichotomy about value and consider the most common challenge to ‘tetrachotomy’ about value, namely the charge that the claim that items can be evaluatively related in a fourth way, by being ‘on a par’, confuses parity with indeterminacy of some kind, i.e., semantic, evaluative, or metaphysical.

Ruth Chang, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, has done ground breaking work on the nature of value.