I argued in Chapter 6 that ‘every fact is value loaded and every one of our values loads some fact’. The argument in a nutshell was that fact (or truth) and rationality are interdependent notions. A fact is something that it is rational to believe, or, more precisely, the notion of a fact (or a true statement) is an idealization of the notion of a statement that it is rational to believe. ‘Rationally acceptable’ and ‘true’ are notions that take in each other's wash. And I argued that being rational involves having criteria of relevance as well as criteria of rational acceptability, and that all of our values are involved in our criteria of relevance. The decision that a picture of the world is true (or true by our present lights, or ‘as true as anything is’) and answers the relevant questions (as well as we are able to answer them) rests on and reveals our total system of value commitments. A being with no values would have no facts either.

The way in which criteria of relevance involve values, at least indirectly, may be seen by examining the simplest statement. Take the sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’. If someone actually makes this judgment in a particular context, then he employs conceptual resources – the notions ‘cat’, ‘on’, and ‘mat’ – which are provided by a particular culture, and whose presence and ubiquity reveal something about the interests and values of that culture, and of almost every culture.