Axiology

In philosophy, axiology is the study of value. The two areas in which axiology has become important are aesthetics (concerned with the value of beauty) and ethics (concerned with the value of rightness in moral and social behavior). Of these, ethics has proved the most fruitful field of study, although any consideration of value would fall into the category of axiology. Although value has been broadly discussed ever since antiquity, the specific term axiology, deriving from the Greek word for value, was itself first employed by the philosophers Paul Lapie and Eduard von Hartmann in the early twentieth century. Axiology examines how people decide—individually and collectively—what kinds of things are better than other kinds of things. Such judgments are made continually, in trivial as well as important matters. As such, axiology is of significance not only to philosophers but also to anyone making a value judgment: its relevance is universal.

Background

Philosophy has always involved itself with value. In fourth-century BCE Greece, when the earliest forms of democracy began emerging, debates around value often focused on the worth of knowledge in relation to ethical duty and responsibility. In his Republic (written around 380 BCE), Plato weighs the merits of various systems of government in terms of their value to their citizens. This classical idea was revisited during the Renaissance of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Europe, and broadened to include other forms of social interaction and the nature of authority generally. When British philosopher and lawyer Francis Bacon (1561–1626) famously asserted that "knowledge itself is power," he was advocating the value of science and scholarship as instrumental in changing the world for the better. The value of learning also formed a crucial part of the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Scottish philosopher Adam Smith defined value on the basis of exchange—the relative worth of money, goods, services, and labor. Aspects of this interpretation were later developed, albeit along different paths, in the "cash-value" theories of American philosopher William James (1842–1910) and the economic programs urged by Karl Marx in Das Kapital (1867). Following the work of Lapie (in French) and Hartmann (in German) in recognizing axiology as a discipline in its own right, Wilbur Marshall Urban published the first English book on the topic in 1909, titled Valuation, Its Nature and Laws, to be subsequently built on by Ralph Barton Perry's General Theory of Value (1926). An important outcome of these studies, formal axiology sought to underpin value formulaically. Its most influential expression, value science, was an attempt made in the 1950s and 1960s by the logician Robert S. Hartman (1910–73) to calibrate value in mathematical terms, using symbolic terminology. In the early twenty-first century, the "Hartman Value Profile" continued to be employed in psychometric evaluations of character. Generally speaking, however, formal axiology is regarded as too narrow to embrace the full range of qualities inherent in the concept of value. The emphasis is typically on axiology as an inclusive set of disciplines, with porous boundaries.

Impact

As a shorthand term for the multiple concepts which inform value, axiology is of broad applicability. Its usefulness consists in bringing together the findings of various fields which, until the early twentieth century, had usually been studied separately. These fields were designated by Perry as realms of value, and they include the whole of religion, morality, art, science, economics, politics, law, and anthropology. To focus scrutiny, there arose a key distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value, in other words, the value of what a thing could do, rather than what it inherently contained. In ancient Greece, the most valued government was deemed to be so because of what it could achieve for the populace. Similarly, the Renaissance theory of knowledge valued learning instrumentally, more than as a benefit in itself. Later axiological concepts, for example those discussed in John Dewey's Theory of Valuation (1939), tended to conclude that what people value most—such as virtue and knowledge—are syntheses of both interpretations. The view that any exploration of value must be inclusive, accommodating an array of qualities rather than isolating a select few, was also developed by pluralist philosophers such as G. E. Moore (1873–1958). In Moore's elaboration of values as organic aggregates of many elements, overall value is determined by how those elements are combined, rather than what they individually are. He believed the value of a thing to be more than the sum of the values of its parts. Moore presented value as a cognitive human construct: put another way, something is desired because it has innate value, and the desire felt for it sheds light on what that value means. In the early to mid-twentieth century, an alternative, noncognitivist theory of value grew in response. A number of British philosophers of the Oxford school denied that value was innate, arguing instead that individuals project their own ideas onto things and then call them values—either for emotive reasons (A. J. Ayer, 1910–89) or to impose priority (R. M. Hare, 1919–2002). From a philosophical perspective, all these interpretations are valid as part of the ongoing explorations of axiology.

Theorists continue to pursue axiological thought in the twenty-first century. One area of inquiry asks whether teaching and research should aim to increase knowledge for its own sake or for the improvement of the world. A related avenue of scrutiny debates whether such research can ever be truly value free. The conventional scientific view is that research must be as free as possible of values, understood as beliefs or preferences. The interpretivist view, however, argues that since that can never be fully achievable, those values should be factored into the process as useful in themselves. This concept has been significantly enriched by cross-cultural awareness of non-Western, and especially Chinese, interpretations of value in decision-making. The flexibility of axiology, which overarches a spectrum of insights rather than a single school of thought or prescriptive code, has reinvigorated the study of value in the twenty-first century and provoked a major resurgence of interest in it.

Bibliography

Bahm, Archie J. Axiology: The Science of Values. Rodopi, 1993.

Biedenbach, Thomas, and Mattias Jacobsson. "The Open Secret of Values: The Roles of Values and Axiology in Project Research." Project Management Journal, vol. 47, no. 3, June/July 2016, pp. 139–55.

Davison, Scott A. On the Intrinsic Value of Everything. Continuum, 2012.

Edwards, Rem Blanchard. Formal Axiology and Its Critics. Rodopi, 2021.

Edwards, Rem B., and John W. Davis, editors. Forms of Value and Valuation: Theory and Applications. New ed., Wipf & Stock, 2014.

Hirose, Iwao, and Jonas Olson, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory. Oxford UP, 2015.

Laszlo, Ervin, and James B. Wilbur, editors. Value Theory in Philosophy and Social Science. New ed., Routledge, 2015.

Orsi, Francesco. Value Theory. Bloomsbury, 2015.

Rescher, Nicholas. Value Matters: Studies in Axiology. De Gruyter, 2013.

Rošker, Jana. Confucian Relationism and Global Ethics: Alternative Models of Ethics and Axiology in Times of Global Crises. Brill, 2023.

Schroeder, Mark. "Value Theory." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 4 Mar. 2021, plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-theory. Accessed 15 Dec. 2024.

Xu, Zhiqiu. Natural Theology Reconfigured: Confucian Axiology and American Pragmatism. Routledge, 2016.