If facts can be ascertained with certainty and are readily available to anyone who seeks them, as the absolutist understands, or, alternatively, if any claim is as valid as any other, as the multiplist understands, there is no point in expending the intellectual effort that the justification and debate of claims entails. The valuing of intellectual engagement is a critical dimension of education for thinking. Hence, it governs whether intellectual potential will be actualized. Yet, the development of intellectual values is not characterized by the sequence of levels that marks the development of epistemological understanding.
Values have both a cognitive and affective component.
Some would say they lie in an intermediate zone between cognition and affect. They are thus likely to be strongly influenced by affective forms of learning. While epistemological understanding provides the necessary conceptual foundation for intellectual values, these experiential differences across families and schools play a major role in the extent to which children come to value the intellectual. Unpublished manuscript , Teachers College, Columbia University.