Migrant Mother (credit: Dorothea Lange, via Wikimedia Commons)

Early tribes gradually learned that general terms – if they accurately describe larger classes of things in reality – can be very useful because more general terms help us to design behaviors that will be more effective in our struggle survive. They enable us to respond to hazards and opportunities in reality more quickly and accurately.  Thus, finally, we come to values, the most general of principles; they apply to huge patterns in our memories of sense data. We care about defining a value term like good because, deep down, we want to know what good is in order to get it and then avoid losing it so that we survive in increasing numbers over the long run.

Terms for values name meta-behaviors, programs that are called up and run within our brains. We continually use values terms learned from our mentors and teachers to form judgments about what we are seeing. Values enable us to prioritize and so they give us order. Sanity. They enable us to decide, second by second, about all that we see: important or trivial? Hazard? Opportunity? Requiring action? Now? Soon? Later? Ever? 

Note, however, that most of the time we don’t take any action when an experience is evoking one of our values. Sometimes we recognize a thing or experience is harmless so we cease to think about it. Being constantly aware of the details in our surroundings does not always mean we respond to them in any way that shows on the outside. Thinking, even thinking about our ways of thinking and which of them have been getting good results lately, is internal behavior. Often, what shows on the outside—to the frustration of the behaviorists, who want to study only what is objectively observable—is nothing at all.