The science of value, or value science, is a creation of philosopher Robert S. Hartman, which attempts to formally elucidate value theory using both formal and symbolic logic.
The fundamental principle, which functions as an axiom, and can be stated in symbolic logic, is that a thing is good insofar as it exemplifies its concept. To put it another way, "a thing is good if it has all its descriptive properties." This means, according to Hartman, that the good thing has a name, that the name has a meaning defined by a set of properties, and that the thing possesses all of the properties in the set. A thing is bad if it does not fulfill its description. If it doesn't fulfill its definition it is terrible (awful, miserable). A car, by definition, has brakes. A car which accelerates when the brakes are applied is an awful car, since a car by definition must have brakes. A horse, if we called it a car, would be an even worse car, with fewer of the properties of a car. The name we put on things is very important: it sets the norm for how we judge them.
He introduces three basic dimensions of value, , extrinsic and intrinsic for sets of properties—perfection is to systemic value what goodness is to extrinsic value and what uniqueness is to intrinsic value—each with their own cardinality: finite, and . In practice, the terms "good" and "bad" apply to finite sets of properties, since this is the only case where there is a ratio between the total number of desired properties and the number of such properties possessed by some object being valued. (In the case where the number of properties is countably infinite, the extrinsic dimension of value, the as well as the mere definition of a specific concept is taken into consideration.)