Skip to main content

Lund University Publications

LUND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Value Relations - Old Wine in New Barrels

Rabinowicz, Wlodek LU (2011)
Abstract
In Rabinowicz 2008, taking my departure from Ruth Chang’s notion of parity in value and from Joshua Gert’s attempt to clarify this notion, I considered how value relations can best be analyzed in terms of fitting pro-attitudes. In the formal model I put forward, fitting pro-attitudes are represented by the class of permissible preference orderings on a domain of items that are being compared. As it turns out, this approach opens up for a multiplicity of different types of value relationships, along with parity and the standard relations of "better", "worse", "equally as good as" and "incomparable in value". Unfortunately, though, the approach is vulnerable to a number of objections. I believe these objections can be avoided if one... (More)
In Rabinowicz 2008, taking my departure from Ruth Chang’s notion of parity in value and from Joshua Gert’s attempt to clarify this notion, I considered how value relations can best be analyzed in terms of fitting pro-attitudes. In the formal model I put forward, fitting pro-attitudes are represented by the class of permissible preference orderings on a domain of items that are being compared. As it turns out, this approach opens up for a multiplicity of different types of value relationships, along with parity and the standard relations of "better", "worse", "equally as good as" and "incomparable in value". Unfortunately, though, the approach is vulnerable to a number of objections. I believe these objections can be avoided if one re-interprets the underlying notion of preference: Instead of treating preference as a 'dyadic' attitude directed towards a pair of items, we can think of it as a difference of degree between 'monadic' attitudes of favouring. Each such monadic attitude has just one item as its object. Given this re-interpretation, permissible preferences can be modelled by the class of permissible assignments of degrees of favouring to items in the domain. From this construction, we can then recover the old modelling in terms of the class of permissible preference orderings, but the previous objections to that model no longer apply. Thus, what we get is the old wine in new and hopefully tighter barrels.

(Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
organization
publishing date
type
Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding
publication status
published
subject
host publication
Philosophical Papers dedicated to Kevin Mulligan
editor
Raboul, Anne
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
5bf3efeb-a6ea-423f-9c31-4222e2d074e5 (old id 2296000)
date added to LUP
2016-04-04 12:56:37
date last changed
2023-11-01 12:18:33
@inbook{5bf3efeb-a6ea-423f-9c31-4222e2d074e5,
  abstract     = {{In Rabinowicz 2008, taking my departure from Ruth Chang’s notion of parity in value and from Joshua Gert’s attempt to clarify this notion, I considered how value relations can best be analyzed in terms of fitting pro-attitudes. In the formal model I put forward, fitting pro-attitudes are represented by the class of permissible preference orderings on a domain of items that are being compared. As it turns out, this approach opens up for a multiplicity of different types of value relationships, along with parity and the standard relations of "better", "worse", "equally as good as" and "incomparable in value". Unfortunately, though, the approach is vulnerable to a number of objections. I believe these objections can be avoided if one re-interprets the underlying notion of preference: Instead of treating preference as a 'dyadic' attitude directed towards a pair of items, we can think of it as a difference of degree between 'monadic' attitudes of favouring. Each such monadic attitude has just one item as its object. Given this re-interpretation, permissible preferences can be modelled by the class of permissible assignments of degrees of favouring to items in the domain. From this construction, we can then recover the old modelling in terms of the class of permissible preference orderings, but the previous objections to that model no longer apply. Thus, what we get is the old wine in new and hopefully tighter barrels.<br/><br/>}},
  author       = {{Rabinowicz, Wlodek}},
  booktitle    = {{Philosophical Papers dedicated to Kevin Mulligan}},
  editor       = {{Raboul, Anne}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  title        = {{Value Relations - Old Wine in New Barrels}},
  url          = {{https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/files/6024544/2296005}},
  year         = {{2011}},
}