This is the revised version of the Presidential Address to the Thirty Eighth All Indian Political Science Conference held at Patiala, December 28-30, 1978. The author is grateful to his esteemed friend, Professor A. K. Saran, for his help in revising this essay for the present publication.

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¹¹ “On Scientific Method in Philosophy” Mysticism and Logic (London: Pelican Books, 1953), p. 106Google Scholar. “On questions of fact,” says Russell, “we can appeal to science and scientific methods of observations, but on ultimate questions of ethics there seems to be nothing analogous” (History of Western Philosophy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945], p. 116).Google Scholar

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¹⁵ Ibid., p. 550.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 337.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 368.

¹⁸ See MacIntyre, A. C., “Hume on ‘is’ and ‘ought,’” Philosophical Review, 68 (1959)Google Scholar; Atkinson, R. F., “Hume on ‘is’ and ‘ought’: A Reply to Mr. MacIntyre,” Philosophical Review, 70 (1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and other essays collected in Hudson, W. D., ed., The Is/Ought Question (London: Macmillan, 1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²¹ The viewpoint presented here may be contrasted with some well-known recent attempts to derive the “Ought” from the “Is.” Special mention should be made of J. R. Searle's famous paper, “How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is,’” Philosophical Review, 73 (1964)Google Scholar, which sparked off much controversy in philosophical journals. See also Max Black's paper, “The Gap between ‘is’ and ‘should,’” Philosophical Review, 73 (1964)Google Scholar. For a criticism of Searle, see Flew, Antony, “On not deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is,’” Analysis, 25 (1964)Google Scholar. These and other relevant papers are collected in Hudson, The Is/Ought Question. Searle's attempt to derive “Ought” from “Is” is inspired by Miss Anscombe's distinction between “brute facts” and “institutional reality” and Austin's concept of “performative utterances.” He starts with such notions as “promising,” “paying one's debt,” etc., and proceeds to argue that institutional facts exist within systems of constitutive rules, systems of constitutive rules involve obligations, commitments and responsibility and within these systems one can derive “Ought” from “Is.” But he forgets that notions like promising are not brute facts. They are basically normative. Hence his attempt to derive “norms” from “facts” becomes a question-begging exercise.

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²⁵ “It is generally believed,” says Heisenberg, “that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from empirical data. If this was the whole truth, when entering into a new field we should introduce only such quantities as can be directly observed and formulate natural law only by means of these quantities. When I was a young man I believed that this was just the philosophy which Einstein followed in his theory of relativity. But when I later asked Einstein about it, he answered: ‘This may have been my philosophy but it is nonsense all the same. It is never possible to introduce only observable quantities in theory. It is theory which decides what can be observed.’ What he meant by this remark is that when we go from immediate observation to the phenomena we are interested in, we must make use of theory and of theoretical concepts. We cannot separate the empirical process of observation from the mathematical constructs and its concepts.” “Tradition in Science,” The American Review, Summer, 1974.Google Scholar

Anatol Rapoport has observed that Galileo's theory of falling bodies is not an empirical theory. It is normative. “It described not how bodies fall, but how they ought to fall under idealized conditions. In this sense one can well see how a theory can be normative, yet truly scientific. The idea of a truly scientific theory of action is not to pontificate about morality, but to prescribe a correct course of action on the basis of a given desiderata, in certain (usually idealized) conditions” (“Various Meanings of Theory,” American Political Science Review, 52 [1958], 983).Google Scholar

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²⁷ This was first enunciated by Hempel in a classic paper entitled “The Function of General Laws in History,” Journal of Philosophy, 1942, and was further elaborated in a series of essays.Google Scholar

²⁸ Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man (ABACUS), 1972, p. 130.Google Scholar

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³⁰ Cf. Marcuse, , One-Dimensional ManGoogle Scholar, “True, the rationality of pure science is value-free and does not stipulate any practical ends: it is ‘neutral’ to any extraneous values that may be imposed upon it. But this neutrality is a positive character. Scientific rationality makes for a specific societal organization precisely because it projects mere form (or mere matter-here, the otherwise opposite terms converge) which can be bent to practically all ends. Formalization and functionalization are, prior to all application, the ‘pure form’ of a concrete societal practice. While science freed nature from inherent ends and stripped matter of all but quantifiable quantities, society freed man from the ‘natural,’ hierarchy of personal dependence and related them to each other in accordance with quantifiable qualities—namely, as units of abstract labor power, calculable in units of time” (pp. 128–29).

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³⁷ Simon, , Smithburg, and Thompson, , Public Administration (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), p. 22.Google Scholar

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⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 21.

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