This weeks reading involved, “A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives,” by Hunter Lewis. The excerpt from the section “Sorting it Out” outlined how humans discover and assign our values. Lewis describes mental modes or the different methods in which we come to know things. The 6 different modes described are sense experience, deductive logic, emotion, intuition, authority, and science.

It was interesting to take a step back and consider how I have come to obtain certain values and knowledge in my life. For a long time, I have believed that values are a learned behavior and that many of the choices I make are based off of things I know to be true through logic. As a scientist, I find truth through observation and experience rather than through emotion or intuition. With that said, seldom do I realize that there are probably many aspects of my life where I have learned things through sense experience and emotion.

When I think about why I value logic and the laws of science over something like emotion I can’t help but wonder if the people we surround ourselves with and our career paths play a role in our developing values. Did I choose to study science because I value logic or have I placed a higher value on logic because I have chosen science as my field of study? This might be a chicken vs. egg type question that we could debate for hours.

Lewis proposes the following flow: mental mode ->way of forming value judgments ->dominant personal value judgment -> specific personal value-> behavior. In this way, our behavior is directly based off of our values and we have created those values based off of what we have learned. I find a lot of truth in this and think that our values can be revealed through our actions and words.

Lewis, H. (1991). Sorting It Out. In A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives  (pp. 3-19). San Fransisco:Harper.