Our contemporary discussions about facts and values owe much to David Hume. In his Treatise of Human Nature from 1736, he famously observed that an “ought”
cannot be logically derived from an “is”: From “God is our Creator,” Hume says, we cannot logically infer that “we ought to obey him” (Hume, 1978, pp. 469–470).
Hume’s argument greatly influenced positivists, empiricists, and many later researchers in psychology and the social sciences. Howard Kendler was a recent advocate for a Humean view with respect to psychology: He claimed that no norma- tive moral truths can be derived from factual statements. This claim was based on two observations (the following reworks arguments previously articulated in Brinkmann, 2005): The first is “the failure of is to logically generate ought”
(Kendler, 1999, p. 832). Kendler notes that in psychology, it is easy to conflate facts with values, but an “earnest desire to design, execute, and interpret a research proj- ect in a manner consistent with scientific objectivity will go far in achieving the desired goal” (p. 833). Kendler rightly notes that “Science is filled with value choices from those that encourage a person to become a scientist to those involved in choosing a criterion to determine the level of evidence that is required to prove a hypothesis” (Kendler, 2002, p. 491). However, he does not think that this has any- thing to do with the defining contents of psychological science. Science, as he says,
“by itself, is incapable of converting empirical relationships into moral principles or social policies” (p. 491). Psychology is only competent to “estimate the conse- quences of different social policies” but cannot “identify the morally correct one”
(p. 501). When psychology is concerned with social and applied matters, it must consequently confine itself to means and remain silent on ends, values, and goals, for there are no matters of fact about these to discover.
Kendler’s second main observation is what he calls moral pluralism. This simply means that “a shared moral conception is impossible to achieve” (Kendler, 1999, p. 834). Consequently, psychology is prevented from trying to define the contents of the good life in a pluralistic society: “Human cognitive ability in an open society resists any form of moral monism while simultaneously seeking to expand moral alternatives” (Kendler, 2002, p. 495). However, Kendler’s argument that psychol- ogy should not define the good life seems to be a value judgment (indeed a reason- able and correct one) that is entirely compatible with a pluralist conception of values and the good life. Kendler seems unjustified in concluding anything about the
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objectivity of normative values from his observation that people disagree about the contents of the good life. It may be, for example, that such diversity is morally valu- able and that Kendler’s argument that psychology should respect this diversity is in fact a good and, yes, objective, value judgment. At this point, we may already notice that it seems quite difficult and even impossible to escape value notions, for, para- doxically, Kendler can only defend his idea that psychology ought to be value-free by invoking values, e.g., objectivity and tolerance toward competing conceptions of the good life.
As indicated above, the contemporary idea of a fundamental dichotomy between facts and values is rooted in Hume’s declaration that it is unwarranted to shift from talk of “is” to talk of “ought” in an argument. In Hume’s case, it is quite clear that the fact-value dichotomy comes from his representationalist epistemology. What humans ultimately are in contact with, Hume argued (as an early exponent of repre- sentationalist psychology), are the mind’s sense impressions and ideas. Impressions are similar to what the logical positivists were to call sense data in the early twenti- eth century, involving actual seeing, hearing, etc. Ideas are on Hume’s account less
“lively” than impressions and consist of thinking about something, rather than actu- ally experiencing it. Concepts are a kind of idea, and they represent “matters of fact”
simply by resembling them. Hume thus has a “pictorial semantics” (Putnam, 2002, p. 15). He thought that concepts succeed in representing the world in virtue of the pictorial properties of ideas. However, he also thought that ideas had other proper- ties: Ideas can be associated with sentiments or emotions (positive as well as nega- tive). And this is what valuation consists of, according to Hume: Valuations are simply sentiments aroused in us when we think about various courses of action. As Putnam says: “Hume does not just tell us that one cannot infer an ‘ought’ from an
‘is’; he claims, more broadly, that there is no ‘matter of fact’ about right and no mat- ter of fact about virtue” (p. 15). If there were such matters of fact about values, then they would have to be picturable in accordance with Hume’s theory of meaning.
Seeing that they are not so picturable, Hume is forced to conclude that there are no moral matters of fact. This theory was taken over by twentieth-century positivists and is retained today by defenders of the fact-value dichotomy in scientific practice, who argue that there simply are no facts about values.
The “facts” that are presupposed by Hume’s fact-value dichotomy are thus facts about the subject’s own sense impressions. The logical positivists originally argued that all factual statements are transformable into statements about immediate expe- rience, expressed in reports of elementary sense data. This was Carnap’s idea in Der logische Aufbau der Welt from 1928. According to the positivists, there were three kinds of statement: analytic statements (true or false in virtue of meanings, e.g., “all bachelors are unmarried”), synthetic statements (true or false in virtue of being empirically verifiable when confronted with sense data, e.g., “there are more than 5000 oak trees in Oxfordshire”), and cognitively meaningless statements, simply incapable of truth and falsehood (all ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical judg- ments). However, the positivists could not have foreseen the developments in the physical sciences that were to come, proving the existence of “unobservables” such as atoms, electrons, gravitational fields, etc. It turned out to be futile and impossible
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to translate statements about these entities into sense data reports, and Carnap con- sequently revised his theory. On the revised account, all meaningful (synthetic) statements had to be cast in the language of physics, Carnap now argued (Putnam, 2002, p. 25). So statements about value still fell outside the sphere of the meaning- ful, since (1) they are not analytic, and (2) they are not intelligible when stated in the language of physics.
The general problem with the revised theory is that if all facts must ultimately be stated in (or be translatable into) the language of physics, then not only do moral, aesthetic, religious, and legal discourse fall outside the realm of the meaningful but also semantical discourse and in principle all normative statements! That is, if the only facts that exist are the facts of physics, then there cannot be facts about what words mean, about what humans say, about how we refer to objects in the world, and so on. Thus, in so far as a physical theory must be stated in a language, it cannot account for its own possibility, given that all facts are facts of physics (Putnam, 2002, p. 106). In this way, the attempt to reduce all statements of fact to the value- neutral language of physics simply undermines itself. In other words, if science is a normative activity, then a completely value-neutral science fails to account for its own possibility.
Furthermore, since Quine’s famous demonstration that there is no absolute dis- tinction between analytic and synthetic statements (Quine, 1951), philosophers have become aware that scientific statements cannot be neatly arranged into “empir- ical facts” (synthetic truths) on the one hand and “linguistic conventions” (analytic truths) on the other. According to Quine’s holism, a scientific theory is tested as a whole against the world (including the theory’s analytic and metaphysical presup- positions). For if we isolate specific hypotheses and submit them to verification/
falsification, then, in the case of an anomaly, it is never clear if we should revise the hypothesis or make adjustments somewhere else in the system. No parts of the sci- entific system are in principle immune to revision, not even “analytic statements.” If that is so, then the notion of an isolated “fact” becomes unclear. It is no longer clear what a singular “fact” is, if the meaning of any factual statement depends on a larger holistic web of meanings, theories, and interpretations.
Accordingly, Hume’s distinction between matters of fact (the “pictorial” element of our ideas) and our sentiments toward those matters of fact (“values”) breaks down, because ideas can no longer be understood as simply referring one by one to matters of fact. An idea is only the idea it is in virtue of a number of other things, including values (as we shall see). So, as Putnam had made clear, if the dichotomy between matters of fact (synthetic statements) and conventions (analytic state- ments) has collapsed, this ought to worry those who advocate a similar dichotomy between facts and values, for that dichotomy is dependent on the very notion of fact that has collapsed. At least, we can no longer work with a notion of facts as
“untainted” by theories, conventions, and normative values. Indeed, as Putnam argued, scientific facts are only intelligible on the background of correct value judg- ments. A crucial part of scientific activity is concerned with judgments of coher- ence, plausibility, reasonableness, simplicity, validity, objectivity, utility, and even
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beauty (Putnam, 2002, p. 31). Mastering concepts such as these means to be able to apply them correctly to competing scientific hypotheses and theories (which is a rational thing to do if one has the relevant disciplinary knowledge). These concepts are not guided solely by an observer’s subjective preferences, but by real, objective, and publicly identifiable properties of hypotheses and theories. And although these concepts pick out real features of the world, they are nonetheless inherently evalu- ative (since, all things being equal, it is normatively better to go for the more coher- ent, simple, and relevant theory over the theory less so). These concepts are thus both guided by real properties in their application and normatively action guiding.
There is no way of separating the evaluative component from the descriptive com- ponent in their meanings (as Hume would have tried), for there simply are no purely descriptive equivalents that pick out the same properties as these concepts. We can only express or translate their meanings by invoking other evaluative concepts.
To anticipate a likely objection, if one came up with the counterargument that although “coherence,” “simplicity,” and “relevance” may be value concepts, they are not moral or ethical concepts, this would be beside the point (and quite likely wrong as well). This argument is not relevant because it does not address the issue that their application involves normative value judgments that are capable of being objective. What are sometimes called “epistemic values” are also values, and if one wants to argue that science should be free from these in order to be objective (itself a value term of course!), then one would have to argue that no value judgment can ever reach a level of be objectivity.
In this first part of the chapter, I have argued against the likes of Hume, the posi- tivists, and Kendler (as a representative of modern mainstream psychology) that science cannot be value-free, because any form of scientific practice presupposes normative values. Thus, in order to arrive at facts about a domain of reality, one has to admit the existence of certain values. This is a very general point about scientific normativity, but what about the social sciences and psychology that not only presup- pose values in the way they are practiced epistemically but also concern a subject matter that is infused with normativity as such?