Defining value in terms of the willingness of people to spend is also stupid. That's why we say that the market overvalues or undervalues things - because we have a real value in mind. You say Bitcoin is a bubble. Why? Because you have some idea of the price it ought to have in mind. That real value obviously cannot be calculated by the willingness of people to spend - people can be idiots. — Agustino

That's cause you don't comprehend what "subjective" really means, besides its common-sense definition. Insofar as subjective properties are concerned, a subjective property is such that no proper conception of how a thing X possesses it can be supplied except in terms of how, under appropriate conditions, such a thing affects a sentient being, a subject. In this way, there is no reason to think that opinions, for example, are subjective, unless in the case of being led by an enormous confusion with the common sense, i.e., to equate "personal" with "subjective". Having clarified this, nothing that is subjective can turn out to be objective. And then, to claim something subjective of common defense to be intersubjectivity is to confuse two different senses of subjective. Only what an object produces in a subject (qualia, for example) can be subjective. Never intersubjective (unless we share our consciousness), so that the intersubjective concerns what exists because of the complex relationships between various subjects. It is also necessary to say, perhaps, notwithstanding that it is not the relations of common defense, to base a subjective idea, which is to make this same idea intersubjective, to be, in fact, a similar idea and not of exact same or common defense: however, it is quite simple to understand why this is wrong. Differentiating the common sense from the abstract sense used in epistemology and theory of perception, a subjective property can only exist in relation to a subject and *only* in relation to a subject. There is no such thing as making intersubjective because perceptual content is not shared among people (no one has the power to enter into the mind of the person and to perceive what his phenomenal consciousness presents). Intersubjective properties are not phenomenologically qualitative. And, moreover, we do not talk much in terms of intersubjective properties but in terms of practical properties and intersubjective knowledge. It is quite illogical to think that subjective property x will become intersubjective if, and only if, all members (or most members) of the human species come to perceive such property X. This is phenomenologically false not only because of the impossibility of sharing phenomena of the inner (absurd) sense, but also because it is already a truism that most subjective properties are universal among humans (since we share the same cognitive-perceptive architecture). It's not the case. Speaking of subjective properties in the sense that it is used in the theory of perception and epistemology, no subjective property can become objective or intersubjective. Indeed, what common sense calls "subjective" is in fact the opposite of "completely divorced from purely personal conceptions and tied to some putatively scientific parameter of adequacy" ... But opinions are, by nature, intersubjective because they can be shared. Opinion is nothing more than a proposition whose truth-value is not strictly determined by the speaker (for lack of evidence with some minimum rigor, for example). Therefore, value is not a mere opinion about a certain good.

Your account of the marginalists leaves me unimpressed. Marx anticipated the diamond in a dessert scenario, which illustrates the difference between use-value and exchange-value. — Sapientia

Actually, Smith talked about this problem in Wealth of Nations...

But "utility" is not a good definition. I could value useless things...

did Adam Smith say that value was determined by Labour? I thoughttween that was a specifically Marxist idea... — bloodninja

"The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possess it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labor which it enables him to purchase or command".(SMITH, 2003, The Wealth of Nations, p. 43)
"The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it". (SMITH, 2003, The Wealth of Nations, p. 43)

And et cetera.

Smith said it. Ricardo, who is kind of his successor, developed it better. Marx took the Ricardo labor-value theory, and developed it even more and used to his critic. It is not originally from Marxists, but today only marxists support this theory, because in this theory is grounded the exploitation of capitalism

My condolences to you, filipeffv. Good luck with your de facto math studies. At least the math you have to learn might be useful in real life. — ssu

Actually, I kind of like maths, and philosophy of math... hahahaha

Economist try to remove this obvious link to politics and ideology by focusing on mathematical models and the obstinate aspiration or desire to make economics "scientific" as umm...physics — ssu

That's is really sad... Notwithstanding social sciences evolved to a academic assumption concern to its epistemological nature, it is weird to think people want to reduce human action and social interaction to predictable rules...

So you could also ask, what is "utility"? — ssu

So, what is it?

Oh, I understand. Sorry, I did wrong.

Ah, but I existed before I joined this group, so your mind did not create me. — Mitchell

Clearly, you do not understand what he is saying, and never even take a book of transcendental epistemology to read... Ah!!!
The Phenomena, not as it is in itself, but as it is to us, is a result of properties of second quality, id est, it is a process in which both the individual mind and the thing in it self (noumena) creates the Phenomena.
"Phenomena are the appearances, which constitute the our experience; noumena are the things themselves, which constitute reality"

There's, in this forum, a wrong epistemological conception and a too much faith in what science can know or can't know, almost a scientificism

This epistemological idea of a reality thoroughly independent of our mind is a mistake, because fall down on of Hume's problems...
Kant had a good answer to Hume, and to everyone who was almost getting crazy with epistemological problems, but Kant's view was kinda rejected by his "successors", like Fichte, Hegel, etc, while positivism was getting the consensus of scientists and logical philosophers. However, even Wittgenstein abandoned logical positivism, and Godel's theorem helped to kill, dig a hole, and push positivism into it.

There exists a Reality independent of my mind. — tom

But we can't know that reality.
The phenomena is the result of understanding and perception of the noumena.

Positivism and Materialism are rare acceptable by philosophy of science; to reject metaphysics is condemn knowledge to mere faith, as proved Gödel to the logical positivists, with his theorems...
Science *can't* prove and demonstrate itself; a system is just proved by an external system.

I imagine these processes are just far too complex for us to fully understand yet and therefore seem random or unpredictable. — SnowyChainsaw

It remembers me Espinoza. But you would have to assume that free will doesn't exist; the problem is that, since everything is a successive and progressive process of causes, it necessarily assumes a free first cause -- one of the kant's antinomies. If you reject the first cause as an exception, why wouldn't human action be possibly, potentially, an exception as well?

Furthermore, the problem of free will is deeper. First, the chemical process of mind are not causes, but effects. Second, and that is the big problem, it is concerned to the core of normativity; pragmatology is clear about it. EVERYTHING has rules: language, semantics, social interaction, etc; a rule has to be necessarily passable of violation, id est, if it is nomologically impossible to violate what is presumed to be a rule, this rule is not what we think it is: it is not a rule, but actually a mere fact, a mere description of things. Well, if a rule supposes the existence of this possibility, therefore the knowledge of free will is accessible by a transcendental deduction of the existence of necessary attributes of a normative conception, and so, as language is fraught of ought, by a transcendental deduction of the necessity of singular terms and predicates' existence interchangeable, in conditions of coextensinality and referentiality through the pragmatic verification of the material inferential rules existence.

You're wrong when you write *sciences*; you should have written "hard sciences", and that'd be more correct. However, this kind of thought is a materialist\positivist one, which has been criticized by a lot of philosophers in twentieth century. The main problem of this materialistic conception is, by rejecting any metaphysics and transcendental knowledge, to not explain and demonstrate a knowledge epistemologically independent, from which all knowledge came -- Sellars refute this fundationalism with his Myth of the Given -, and fall in mistakes when studying social sciences. The reason, by which it is explained the universal characterization of natural laws in physics and in natural sciences, is demonstrated in Kant's epistemology, and the categories of knowledge, that positivism and materialism rejected until Sellars, Popper, and Gödel... Furthermore, Social Sciences are not made by universals and natural laws, and nothing into this field of knowledge and analysis could be reduced to them; that's why positivism is wrong, and so it is materialism, historicism, etc.