The True Value. On Understanding Something

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