Elena Padoan
Università della Svizzera Italiana
Mozart and Michelangelo are both artists. Are they comparable as artists? They are, since they can be compared with respect to creativity. Yet it does not seem correct to say that one artist is better than the other, nor that they are equally good with respect to creativity, since they exhibit different respects of creativity to different degrees. How, then, should this situation be understood?
One influential response is offered by what I call the ‘Parity view’ from Ruth Chang (1997; 2002), who challenges the Trichotomy Thesis according to which the three value-relations—“better than”, “worse than” and “equally good”—exhaust the logical space of comparability. Instead, Ruth Chang argues for a fourth value-relation, which she calls “on a par”. Two items are on a par with respect to a value V when each is better than the other in some respects, yet neither is better in all respects of V. But how should parity among items be analysed?
Working in a Naïve Realist framework about values, I argue for two core claims: (i) that multi-dimensionality is a necessary condition for parity and (ii) that multi-dimensionality is naturally modelled by representing values as vectors. The first claim is supported by appeal to Ruth Chang’s “Unidimensional Chaining Argument”, where it is assumed that respects of values are dimensions of values (Hedden and Muñoz 2024). The second claim aims to accommodate the multi-dimensionality of values, proposing to model values as vectors of real numbers, where each number measures how good or bad an item is in a certain dimension (Muñoz 2024).
In my paper, I conclude that Mozart and Michelangelo are on a par with respect to creativity because both are assigned the value of creativity, which is a multi-dimensional value naturally modelled as a vector, and because each is better than the other in some dimensions, but neither is better in all dimensions of creativity.
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SOPhiA 2026 