The task of presenting for explicit view the store of appraisive terms
our language affords has been undertaken in the conviction that it will
be of interest not only to ethics and other philosophical studies but
also to various areas of social science and linguistics. I have
principally sought to do justice to the complexities of this vocabulary,
the uses to which it is put, and the capacities its use reflects. I have
given little thought to whether the inquiry was philosophical and
whether it was being conducted in a philosophical manner. Foremost in my
thoughts were the tasks that appeared to need doing, among them these:
explicit attention was to be given to the vocabulary by means of which
we say we commend, judge, appraise, or evaluate subjects and subject
matters in our experience; it was to be segregated from other language
at least for the purpose of study; the types of appraisive resources
that are at hand in a language such as English were to be classified in
some convincing and not too artificial manner; and an empirical
standpoint was to be developed for a better view of appraisal,
evaluation, and judging within the framework of other ways we have of
responding to our surround- ings such as appetition and emotion on one
side and factual registering and theorizing about states of affairs on
the other. Such an inquiry has never been undertaken in quite this
manner before.