Saturday, September 4, 2010

Prescriptive Claims

Epstein talks about prescriptive claims and descriptive claims and compares the two. A claim is considered to be descriptive if it says what it is. A claim is prescriptive if it says what should be. In a way, these two claims have the same relationship that subjective and objective claims do. A subjective claim is based more on opinion or a belief in the same way that a prescriptive claim is what a person thinks should be. An objective claim is not based on what others believe, it is based on fact as well as a descriptive claim.
An example of a descriptive claim would be:  "This water is lukewarm."
An example of a prescriptive claim would be: " Cassie should put her water bottle in the fridge."
Epstein goes on to explain that often when people say that something is good, better, best, bad, worse, worst or some other kind of value judgment, they are making a prescriptive claim.

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