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Value, Fact and Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Robert S. Hartman
Robert S. Hartman*
Affiliation:
Centro de Estudios Filosóficos, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
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Extract

Professor Everett W. Hall's new book, Modern Science and Human Values, one of the most important to have appeared in the field of Value Theory in the last ten years, shares in rich measure the common characteristic of so many other “prolegomena” to the future discipline of values: it is almost maddeningly frustrating. It sees with crystal clearness the essence of the scientific method and describes it in brilliant detail, from Galileo to Einstein; but it fails to draw a positive moral for value theory. On the contrary, its thesis is thoroughly negative: although value must be known as thoroughly as fact if the world is to survive, the scientific method that has brought us knowledge of fact can never bring us knowledge of value. For fact and value are fundamentally different, fact is known by science in a way that excludes value, and hence, whatever may be the way by which value is to be known, it cannot be science. It is true, science has given the most powerful and incisive formulation to fact while value theory has done nothing of the sort for value. Value theory, therefore, must be brought up to the level of science, otherwise there is danger that we may perish under the impact of science. But how to bring this about, how to construct a value theory as powerful and as representative of value as science is of fact, that is the question which the book can only ask but not answer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 1958 , pp. 97 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1958

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References

1 Von Nostrand, New York, 1956.

2 I am not, of course, discussing What Is Value?

3 In Kepler's De Harmonice Mundi, 1619.

4 This highlights Hall's continuous struggle with the law of excluded middle. Thus, value, for Hall, though “related to fact” (p. 6) is “no relation” (p. 474); Moore's intrinsic nonnatural properties, which he professes not to understand, are, according to his understanding, too natural to be nonnatural yet, are not natural either (pp. 454,474); etc.

5 Here “value” is identified with “goal behavior,” later it is connected with “attention and … interest” (p. 6), and in the “terminological digression” mentioned above it is regarded as what is “good,” “bad,” or “ought to be or not.” The relationship between these various versions of “value” is not discussed.

6 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, translated by Stillman Drake, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953, p. 113.

7 Susanne K. Langer, The Practice of Philosophy, New York, 1936.

8 Susanne K. Langer, op. cit., pp. 199 ff.

9 Op. cit., p. 202.

10 Op. cit., p. 202.

11 Cf., as a random sampling, R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation, 1953, pp. 1 ff.; J. B. Conant, Science and Common Sense, 1951, pp. 23 ff.; A. Einstein, Essays in Science, Philos. Library, pp. 4, 23, pass.; H. Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality, 1950, pp. 28 ff., pass.; M. Planck, Dynamische und statistische Gesetzmässigkeit, 1914, p. 6; Plato, Timaeus, 27C ff., 48E ff., pass.; H. Reichenbach, Philosophy and Physics, 1918, p. 1 ff.; A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 1955, p. 97

12 Op. cit., pp. 204, 206.

13 Op. cit., pp. 206 f.

14 Op. cit., p. 207.

15 Op. cit., p. 208.

16 Hall disparages this kind of thinking as “the occupational disease” of the professional philosopher. (What Is Value? p. ix).

17 This very notion has been proposed as a definition of value by the present writer. See Robert S. Hartman, “A Logical Definition of Value,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XLVIII, No. 13, June 21, 1951. For a fuller discussion of the new logic see the same, The Language of Value, Ray Lepley ed., New York, 1957, pp. 197 ff., 357 ff., 352 ff. Also, “The Analytic and the Synthetic as Categories of Inquiry,” Perspectives in Philosophy, Ohio State University, 1953; “The Analytic, the Synthetic and the Good: Kant and the Paradoxes of G. E. Moore,” Kant Studien, Vol. 45 (1953–4), pp. 67–82, Vol. 46 (1954–5), pp. 3–18; and “Group Membership and Class Membership,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XIII, (1953), No. 3, pp. 353–370. For a more comprehensive account see Axiologia Formal: La Ciencia de la Valoración, Universidad Nacional de México, 1957.

18 One who actually builds up a logic of value, as Galileo did a geometry of motion, that is, one who defines value rather than speculates about what it may be. To establish a logical theory of value two things are necessary:

(1) to make the fundamental distinction drawn in this paper between the content and the method of the value discipline. In particular, one must not confuse the subject-matter of the investigation, the common-sense phenomenon of value, with the methodological tool employed in the investigation, the logical construct that defines value. This confusion is found not only in the book we discussed but also in What Is Value?, e.g. p. 53, n. 2 and pp. 196 ff. The last chapter of this book ought to be extended into the sequel to What Is Value? entitled What Is a Theory of Value?

(2) to define value in such a way that the definition will refer to a primary quality in the Galilean sense, i.e. one that is an element of a system. If it belongs to no system it is no such quality and methodologically useless. Thus, the normative definition of value, since there is no system of normative logic, is not a primary quality of value in the sense discussed. On the other hand, the notion of exemplification is such a quality if interpreted as the class-membership relation and identified with valuation. We would then have the identification of a central element of the system of logic with a value phenomenon, and this would exactly correspond to Galileo's identification of central elements of geometry, say, conic sections, with phenomena of motion, say, the trajectory of projectiles.