I should note that my answer does not address the question “what is esteem/worth/etc.?”. I think that’s a trickier question because it’s actually a whole bunch of stuff we cluster together for a wide variety of reasons as a result of dependencies in how we assess meaning in ways that we know how to make legible, so I ignore it here and just assume esteem is some kind of metric, specifically meaning that it can be measured and that the measure looks enough like a real number that we can pretend it is. Reality is likely more complicated than that, but I’m not interested in exploring a full reduction of esteem right now, so this seems a reasonable enough practical choice to at least say something as it relates to how esteem-like processes operate in the mind under this theory.
I should note that my answer does not address the question “what is esteem/worth/etc.?”. I think that’s a trickier question because it’s actually a whole bunch of stuff we cluster together for a wide variety of reasons as a result of dependencies in how we assess meaning in ways that we know how to make legible, so I ignore it here and just assume esteem is some kind of metric, specifically meaning that it can be measured and that the measure looks enough like a real number that we can pretend it is. Reality is likely more complicated than that, but I’m not interested in exploring a full reduction of esteem right now, so this seems a reasonable enough practical choice to at least say something as it relates to how esteem-like processes operate in the mind under this theory.