The True Value. On Understanding Something

Abstract

This contribution focuses on some issues of the evaluation discipline that, because of their generality, concern the practice of the value judgment. The value judgment, as it coordinates evidences, inferences and decisions, deals with epistemological, logical and ethical matters; therefore it connects knowledge with responsibility—personal and social—upon the allocation of the real rights and the transformation of the city and the territory which depend on the result of the evaluation. The value judgment mainly connects a factual realm with a value realm. The connection between these two spheres bases on argumentations concerning: the description of the characteristics of the economic goods involved, the definition of a causal relationship between these characteristics and their market appreciation, expressed by price; the placement of the good inside this relationship according to the described characteristics. This contribution discusses the elements of truth of this model, that in certain cases is very weak in epistemological and in logical terms as well, trying to stress the difference between “science of the valuations” and “estimation”, therefore between a science of the interpretation of the values and a technique of simple observation and elicitations of occurrences by means of statistics procedures independent from the observer. In this sense it tries to compare some aspects of the theory of truth to the main elements of the theory of value we generally apply, but not always with full awareness. The contribution constitutes the initial part of a more extensive research. It analyzes some aspects of the relation between truth and value and highlights, on the grounds of the articulations of the problem of the trueness and the nature of the evaluative statement, some relevant operative issues of the discipline.