My initial sense of optimism began to fade away as Roger continued. He went on to say that this had been “a horrible prison” but quickly pivoted to discuss the positive things the prison was now doing to make life better for the people held captive there, including providing accredited college courses and degrees from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. While it was encouraging to hear about the progress the prison had made, the time line Roger provided seemed, at best, abbreviated, if not willfully misleading.
Eagleton literary theory
Facts are public and unimpeachable, values are private and gratuitous. There is an obvious difference between recounting a fact, such as 'This cathedral was built in 1612,' and registering a value-judgement, such as 'This cathedral is a magnificent specimen of baroque architecture.' But suppose I made the first kind of statement while showing an overseas visitor around England, and found that it puzzled her considerably. Why, she might ask, do you keep telling me the dates of the foundation of all these buildings? Why this obsession with origins? In the society I live in, she might go on, we keep no record at all of such events: we classify our buildings instead according to whether they face north-west or south-east. What this might do would be to demonstrate part of the unconscious system of value-judgements which underlies my own descriptive statements. Such value-judgements are not necessarily of the same kind as 'This cathedral is a magnificent specimen of baroque architecture,' but they are value-judgements none the less, and no factual pronouncement I make can escape them. Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accomplished by making them, and so on.
