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27 J. Value Inquiry 1 (1993)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi27 and id is 1 raw text is: The Journal of Value Inquiry 27: 1-11, 1993. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Articles Evaluations as assessments, Part I: Properties and their signifiers THOMAS MAGNELL Department of Philosophy, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940-4031, USA The need to re-cognize evaluations After a period of quiescence, questions of meta-ethics and, more generally, value theory have begun to excite controversy.1 Old discussions about the cognitive status of evaluative assertions have been reopened. The terminol- ogy has changed. Where once opposing views were known as cognitivism and non-cognitivism, today they are more likely to come under the rubric of realism and anti-realism. This may not matter much, though, like David Wiggins, I think the older labels preferable.2 What does matter is that the structure of controversy today is little different from that of the heated disputes of the past. That will have to change. The disputes were not shallow or idle. On the contrary, they were replete with incisive observa- tions. The turn away from theoretical questions about evaluative reasoning to practical questions of evaluative reasoning was due, in part, to an impasse in the discussions that made them stale. If the renewed interest in the theoretical questions is to be sustained, we must view evaluative assertions in a new light. Only then may we add to insights already realized. Evaluative assertions are fundamentally comparative. They belong to a broad class of implicitly comparative assertions that I shall call assessments. Put more simply, evaluations are assessments. This may seem undeniable; and indeed I think it should be readily accepted. But as will become clear in Evaluations as Assessments, Part II, this use of the word assessment has far-reaching implications. There I will be using the word in a technical sense which I think captures its ordinary meaning. It will be felicitous insofar as it facilitates a discussion of the joint characteristics of a broad class of implicitly comparative assertions. But under whatever label, the characteristics of assertions of this class are what need to be fully understood. Assertions of a class that are not implicitly comparative, I shall call claims. Again, I will be giving a technical sense to a common word.

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