The Value as a Fact.

The formal assessment and its problems

Abstract

The paper focuses on the assessment of the products of human ingenuity, in particular those concerning the scientific production. The transition between the ‘natural’ assessment and the ‘formal’, or administrative, one is discussed, considering the critical voices addressed to the device in itself, coming from France and Italy. The emerging problems allow to outline the presupppositions for the re-thinking of the assessment in a way that the ‘value’ is not transformed in a conventional and measurable ‘fact’.