Abstract

A comprehensive empirical study of value, explicitly indebted to the work of R. B. Perry, but brought up-to-date by considerable refinement of method and by the inclusion of much recent material from anthropology, psychology, and the social sciences. Pepper considers the question of "how to make well-grounded decisions in human affairs". His analysis yields the concept of "selective systems" as the organizing principle of types of value and of value selection. Among these are personal, social, and cultural valuation patterns; the system of natural selection is superimposed upon all the others.--J. F. D.