Being as Value: The Phenomenology of Value and the Ontology of Self-Realization in Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores one way of putting selves and values back into the world. I analyze Charles Taylor’s, Iris Murdoch’s, and Donald Walhout’s arguments showing that to be a self is to relate to being as a value. I show that the intentional relation of world-directedness that is central to self discloses being first as a value. I argue that our best account of what it is to be a self commits us to the objectivity of values. I then explore Taylor’s arguments that, by denying a place for objective values in nature, the standard naturalist ontology leaves a gap between nature and self. I argue that this gap arises because current naturalism cannot account for the place of the intentional relation, which is our first guide to value, in the world. It thereby leaves a gap between third- and first-personal perspectives that obscures the nature of values as properties of relational situations. I explore Michiel Meijer’s objection that Taylor leaves an unresolved gap between ontology and phenomenology in his defense of value realism. I draw on the little-known work of Donald Walhout to show how this gap can be filled by analyzing value in terms of function.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".