The term “value” has a wide range of current usage in philospohy and the sciences. Descriptively, a man's “values” may refer to all his attitudes for-or-against anything. His values include his perferences and avoidances, his desire-objects and aversion-objects, his pleasure and pain tendencies, his goals, ideals, interests and disinterests, what he takes to be right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, his approvals and disapprovals, his criteria of taste and standards of judgment, and so forth.

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This paper proposes a concept of "valid reasoning" that will apply univocally to reasoned judgment (inference), Reasoned decision (choice), And reasoned withholding of judgment and decision. "reasoning" is taken to include all these; "validity" of reasoning is defined in terms of the "ideally rational mind", Which is in turn defined by a modal logic of judging and deciding. The definition is defended by relating it to another ideal, That of the socratically omniscient and stoically omniscient sage, Who is defined by (...) a modal logic of knowing and doing. In the course of this I distinguish between the vehicle and the description of a mental act, Deny that reasoning is a transition, Analyze doing as causing to be, And maintain that, Since doing stands to deciding as knowing stands to judging, Reasoned decision is genuinely practical reasoning. (shrink)