SummaryThe recent polemic sparked off by the debate between Stephen Watson and Andries Oliphant in The Weekly Mail (April‐May 1989) underscores the fact that the contingency of value judgments coupled with the complexities of a diverse number of critical theories make it imperative to develop a methodology which will prevent a breakdown in critical discourse and enable the literary historian to identify, classify and evaluate the subjective value judgments at a particular point in time from a sound philosophical basis. This paper explores the methodological possibilities implied by Shusterman's analysis of the logical status of value judgments by an examination of the evaluative strategies employed by Watson and Oliphant in their respective reviews of SA in Poetry/SA in Poësie.