I agree with this week’s reading that defining human values and how they are determined is a complex topic. I agreed with the statement, “it should become clear on reflection that their are very few interior mental modes through which we come to ‘believe’ or ‘know’ anything” (9). Upon looking at my own personal values, I realized that these four modes, sense experience, deductive logic, emotion, and intuition, are the four basic modes that I base my values and beliefs on, also along with the two synthetic modes, authority and scientific. Although I find these modes quite accurate, I do not believe that everyone will agree with them, which is another big point in this reading that I agree with. I liked how this reading gave an example of someone who disagreed with these modes and believed that divine revelation should be considered an important aspect of defining human values. I agreed with the author’s logic on divine revelation can just be seen as an example of sense experience and after discussing this states that, “the reader agreed that revelation could be viewed as a special case of sense experience.” This example shows that how people define values is both different among individuals and also that individuals often change the way they see values. By agreeing with the author, the reader started to use deductive logic and sense experience to determine her values instead of revelation. Although I believe that these modes are major aspects of how an individual comes to believe or think something is important, they may not be the only modes. Defining personal values and beliefs is a very broad topic and I do not think it can be condensed to just one single idea, but I agree that it can be condensed to a few basic ideas that define how people decide to believe something.
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Your article is interesting and with great ideas. Personal value seems very abstract and hard to define. And I totally agree with you about “ Sense experience, deductive logic, emotion, and intuition, are the four basic modes that you base your values and beliefs on, also along with the two synthetic modes, authority and scientific”. These are the essential methods that we come to “know” something, and also the ways that people believe things. People have to know or believe things, then make choices and to choose their values. Also value is completely different to everyone. For example, a kid buy an ice cream, it smells sweet, and tasted good, so for the kid, the satisfaction of ice cream is a value to him. Also, maybe for an adult, emotion is a value. However, value is a complex item. We are not sure are the basic modes of developing values truly complete. And we have to consider majority of other factors into value, like personal behavior. I have similar feeling like as you, defining personal values and beliefs is a very broad topic. It’s hard and complex and depends on how each person’s thinkings.
I’m happy that you were able to understand my perspective and ideas on values from this week’s reading. I like how you made the point that “value is completely different to everyone,” and how you gave the example of the kids buying and eating an ice cream cone. To the kid who enjoys ice cream this would be considered a positive experience that the child values, to someone who does not like ice cream or to someone who may be lactose intolerant, this could be a very negative experience. You also say that “maybe for an adult, emotion is value.” I agree with this but also want to add that I don’t think this needs to be limited to just adults, I think that people of all age value emotion in one way or another. You also bring up the idea of personal behavior. I think that people most likely behave a certain way due to their values and emotions, which as you said does depend on how each person is thinking.