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Value Judgments: How to Reason About Value Judgments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Stephen R. L. Clark
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Extract

When opinion polls are conducted on some urgent matter of the day (the character of Colonel Qaddafi, or the compatibility of some soon-to-be-married royal couple) those polled are permitted to declare themselves ‘Don't Knows’. It is usually a minority who are so ill-disposed as to forget their civic duty to have an opinion on each and every subject, and they can usually expect to be rebuked as fence-sitters or slugabeds. People confronted by the demand that they take sides can generally produce a ‘view’ which they maintain against all-comers without the slightest attempt to seek out confirmation or counter-evidence. Sometimes, no doubt, this view ‘bubbles up’ from the speaker's entrenched evaluations and opinions; sometimes it has simply been selected, off the cuff, from the available alternatives and entered in the speaker's ‘axiom set’, the things she'll say when asked, or which she may even ‘act on’ in some more material way—without any implication that the alternative opinion would not once have done as well.

Type
Research Article
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 24 , March 1988 , pp. 173 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1988

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References

Notes

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