ABSTRACT
VALUATION is ordinarily excluded from epistemology, presumably on the ground that it is a non-cognitive process to which the analyses and categories of factual and formal knowledge are inapplicable. Now it is unquestionably true that moral and aesthetic appraisals cannot be judged true or false in the same sense as ordinary factual propositions. Nevertheless, moral and aesthetic appraisals have a quasicognitive aspect; they are expressed in the same propositional form as statements of fact, they make claims upon our intellectual assent, and they are subject to the same logical operations as factual truths. It would, therefore, seem incumbent upon the epistemologist at least to consider the cognitive claims of valuational propositions and to examine the relation between valuational, factual, and postulational propositions. In the analysis of the meaning, import, and possible validity of valuational propositions I shall confine my attention to the ethical, because ethical theory is in a more advanced stage than aesthetic theory, and presumably there is no difference of principle between the moral and the aesthetic judgment.
