Axiology
The study of values — what is good, true, beautiful, and worthy of pursuit or embodiment; the ground under the system of Values.
Axiology asks how a people decides what is worth anything. In this Field the question is not left implicit: Values are named as the selection function — shared values, or we perish — and a set is actually declared. Truth · Love · Justice · Stewardship · Wisdom, and beneath them the one that makes the Game possible at all: a word given is a word kept, or a gap learned from, without blame.
It is load-bearing because Value in the operational sense depends on it. The system defines Value as Throughput of the Goal and its opposite as Waste — which is only meaningful if the Goal is itself worth pursuing, and that is an axiological claim, not an accounting one. Cut the link and the measurement machinery will happily optimise toward anything. The canon's guard is that The Goal is received rather than set: Creator's Intent sits above the whole value system, and everything below it is revisable.
The canon also reads value as a gradient rather than a verdict. Value is the degree of conformance to the Ideal — never a pass/fail stamp — and the true questions are where a thing sits on the gradient and which way it is moving. the canon names anti-values as the shadow set within Values; The compass question is axiology compressed to something a ten-year-old can ask.
In play it appears as the way a Cell chooses between two good things: not by preference or by vote alone, but by Advantage Based Decision Making and by asking which move makes life a little more like Heaven — and, among older players, whether it is the highest thing available right now for themselves and the whole.
Also called: the study of values Stands on: Values · Goodness · Truth · Beauty Opens onto: Value · Throughput · The compass question · Ideal · Teleology In play: Met at the table when two good moves compete and the Cell has to say why it chose one. Sources: The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, Pillar I ("the study of values—what is good, true, beautiful, and worthy of pursuit"; states Work In Progress) · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, Values · The Living Gradient (root page, on Value as gradient reading) · lionsberg.wiki: The LIØNSBERG System of Values. Open: The canon carries at least two value lists — the cardinal values of the Pattern Language and the five named in the Plan — without stating their relationship. Neither is described as superseding the other.