Value claim

From EvaluationWiki

There are four common types of value claim: (i) personal preferences, (ii) market value claims, (iii) contextual value claims, and (iv) true value claims. (i) Much of the attack on evaluation as having no place in science was based on the simplistic assumption that all value claims are statements of personal preference, which of course are not intended to be generalizable as applicable to other people and hence fail a requirement for scientific truth. But the other three types are claims that can be established by others. (ii) The discipline of evaluation is normally concerned with the fourth category, but the assessment of market value is a professional branch of evaluation, too, and many people call in and pay an 'assessor' to do this job when they are buying or selling a house. (iii) Contextual (a.k.a., implicit or crypto-) value claims are simply those made in empirical (i.e., non-evaluative) language but in a context where the empirical property ascribed to something is of great value: as when a diamond is said to be a 'river white'). (iv) In evaluation, as commonly understood today, claims of 'true value' such as "The program for teaching work skills operates quite effectively, but no better than several much cheaper alternatives," or "It was an error to do the cataract surgery on a prostate patient without taking him off Flomax for two weeks prior to the operation," are just as provable or disprovable by publicly available evidence as the usual kinds of scientific claim. See value judgment.