The person taking the test must rank the questions in part one from best to worst with 1 being the best and 18 being the worst. In the second part, the questions are ranked from most agree to least agree. Supposedly, there is no right or wrong answer and the profile can be used to discover strengths and weaknesses as well as help a person choose a career path (http://www.hartmaninstitute.org). After finding out the information that I did on this subject, I cannot say that I am wholly convinced on the concept of axiology. Dr. Hartman has shown us that the questions on his profile can be manipulated mathematically, but I still have trouble with the issue of the questions themselves. They were developed by Dr. Hartman so they are based on what he values and what his personal ethics are. Most of us would agree that some of the questions such as, "Torture a person in a concentration camp" or "Slavery" should be rank at the bottom. It is also common to expect that "a baby" and "a good meal" would be somewhere at the top of the heap. They claim there are not right or wrong answers, but there really are because those giving the test have to be expecting the test taker to score the test in a certain way. If not, for instance, if the person ranks "Slavery" as number one, then they will be judged as different from the norm.

I am in no way discounting Dr. Hartman's theories or his work on axiology. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize so it is evident that he made significant contributions to science and society. What I am stating based...

How does one do that without being biased? I don't think it can be done. Each of us has a basic sense of what is right and wrong, but some opinions will vary given the different cultures and given the environments that we were raised in. In my opinion, axiology all boils down to personal opinion and I do not think that can be measure because it is intangible. It seems as though value is more qualitative than quantitative in nature and statistical software packages can measure results qualitatively, but they are not as accurate as data that is measured quantitatively.
Axiology is something that is fairly new to me. I hadn't heard much about it and was a bit excited to research something that was new to me. Most of the information found was written by Dr. Hartman himself and I thought there may be some bias involved. I tried finding scholarly journal articles, but there was nothing recent to be found on the subject. I felt as though the concept of studying value died in the early 1970's along with Dr. Hartman. I'm not saying the science is a farce. What I will say is that it is confusing and therefore difficult to endorse.

Works Cited

http://www.cleardirection.com/docs/axiology.asp (Accessed on July 18, 2010).

http://www.hartmaninstitute.org/html/HartmanValueProfile.html (Accessed on July 18, 2010).

http://www.valueinsights.com/axiology3.html (Accessed on July 18, 2010).