Dear Frederico

I take it by valuation you mean something like a mapping of goods and services into the number line?  For pehaps 3,000 to 4,000 years this line was itself was primarily instantiated by matters to do with weighed metal.  The changing metrologies of that matter were keenly studied by a huge number of individuals from the Renaissance down to and including the generation prior to my own – I met or corresponded with many – Grierson at Cambridge, Munro at Toronto, Sperber in Sweden, Pellicer in Spain.  However, the matter dropped almost entirely off the professional academic curriculum for anyone educated after c. 1970.  I have not read the texts cited so far (eg of 1999, 2006 and 2009).  I would be delighted if anyone were to contact me off group to explain or defend then.

Keynes studied these traditional metrological matters intensively from around 1921 to 1926 but subsequently scoffed at the entire body of work.  The primary account he gives in “Treatise on Money” is historically bogus.  On my reading his close associate Wittgenstein tried in general to undermine rational thought on metrological matters in the mid 1930’s.  

The only living professional steeped in the traditional metrology of metallic value I know of is Harald Witthöft – he is I think 92.  When I was young the view that Wittgenstein was involved in charlatanism was still quite widespread, but the only front line philosopher I know still at all associated with that idea is A C Grayling (now c. 74).

My hypothesis is that the rise of fiat and post-modernism are close intellectual as well as historical bedfellows, and that a correct professional understanding of such matters died as a consequence of “tacit knowledge” spread, roughly speaking, during the Cold War.

Robert Tye, York UK

https://independent.academia.edu/RobertTye