ABSTRACT
If one is committed to distinguishing between facts and values, a claim that something matters would seem to fall on the value side-a “matter of concern,” in Bruno Latour’s terms, rather than a “matter of fact” (Latour 2004). I want to suggest that thinking about mattering destabilizes the distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern, between facts and values, by helping to dislodge a picture of “pure facts” as motivationally inert but doxastically potent-that is, as rationally compelling belief so long as untainted by the value judgments that would lead us to act on them. Mattering also challenges a picture of values and valuing as distinctively human: the “entanglement” of facts with values that Hilary Putnam (2002) argues is endemic to facts as we encounter them is, I will suggest, operative as well in the nonhuman world.
