Assumptions and Objective Value-Theory. Meinong’s Psychology of Valuation

The problem of value and the related effort in proposing a scientific-objective treatment of it are of the utmost importance in Meinong’s philosophical thought. Theoretically speaking, it is common to talk of a conceptual path that led Meinong to abandon the subjective perspective he out- lined in the early 1890s in favour of an objective one developed during the period 1910–1920. Accordingly, the goal of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, we sketch out both the more significant aspects of the subjective value-theory developed in the Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werth-Theorie (1894) and the main thesis characterizing the objective value-theory that Meinong approximately started to outline after the publication of the second edition of Über Annahmen (1910). On the other hand, we wish to highlight that this change was determined both (1) by his elaboration, from 1899 onwards, of a theory of objects within which the so-called ‘dignitatives’ and ‘desideratives’ have a specific ontological relationship, and (2) by the attention Meinong paid to assumptive phenomena.