Alfred notes that in his thinking "it is possible to understand values as
relations among facts " ....
and I thought it interesting (see my other posting for today) that quite
similarly, functional semantics inteprets evaluations as predications about
facts .... indeed as the ONLY possible predications about facts ...
Take any "fact" expressed as a clause: Alfred is developing semeco tools ...
What can you predicate of this fact or state-of-affairs as such?
"The fact that Alfred is developing semeco tools IS ..... "?
or in an equivalent and more common locution:
"It is (very) ..... that Alfred is developing semeco tools."
Fill in the blank .... and you find that the only terms which fit are
expressions of evaluation of one of about six semantic classes:
desirability, normativity, usuality, importance, warrantability,
seriousness ... and their opposites and degrees (and a couple of marginal
grey areas mentioned elsewhere).
It is quite wonderful that ... It is significant that ...... It is unusual
that ..... It is imperative that .... It is ironic that ... It is very
unlikely that .....
The general semantics of appraisal extends this scheme to the larger
numbers of qualities that we use in evaluating persons, things, works of
art, natural phenomena, processes etc. But the core semantics is our
evaluation of facts, or propositions (and proposals). All our values can be
expressed in terms of such evaluations.
The usual interpretation is that these evaluations are orientational
stances of the speaker toward the proposition, a relation of speaker to the
content-meaning (or presentational, ideational meaning) spoken. But this is
a typically Western individualistic view. "I think that it is very
unfortunate that ....", which can be backgrounded as: "It is very
unfortunate that ..." but the stance of the speaker is still implied.
If we make this somewhat more extended conceptually ...
It is very unfortunate that [something is so] BECAUSE [something else is so].
-- And here the meaning must be A is unfortunate because B (there are
other possible interpretations).
Then we are closer to a view in which the evaluation (unfortunate, an
instance of the Desirability class) is in effect a relation between two
facts, A and B. And more generally among sets or clusters of facts we have
connected logically:
[Fact--logic--Fact--logic--Fact] ------- EVALUATION ---------
[Fact-logic-Fact-logic-Fact]
So, it would be interesting to compare this view of values as relations
among facts or clusters of facts with what Alfred has in mind ... which I
hope and trust will be a more phenomenological and dynamical account, but
perhaps one in which this more static semiotic account can be seen as some
sort of product or production schema?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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