Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Contingencies Of Value

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Different people have numerous elucidations of what is valuable to them. In the “Contingencies of Value” chapter by Barbara Herrnstein Smith she discusses the diverse ways in which various values are created, sustained and passed along. Part one of the article is the act of evaluation -- what it is we are doing when we evaluate an art work, a culture, a belief, a practice -- and her secondary topic is the meaning of value. She states that “value is “relative” in the sense of contingent (that is, a changing function of multiple variables) rather than subjective (that is, personally whimsical, locked into the consciousness of individual subjects and/or without interest or value for other people). Her text shows that we may not be able to bluntly

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