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The Identity of Fact and Value

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Ray Lepley
Ray Lepley*
Affiliation:
Bradley Polytechnic Institute, Peoria, Illinois
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Extract

Social conflicts of ever widening scope have in recent years emphasized the importance of the problem of the relation of facts and values. This problem has received increasing attention from researchers and theorists in both the physical and social sciences. A number of interesting but by no means compatible solutions have been proposed.

Perhaps the simplest and most striking is the position of Carnap, Russell, and others, that value sentences, such as “A ought not to kill B” or “Killing is evil” are merely commands or expressions of wish and, as such, are emotional ejaculations or expletives but not statements which have any theoretical sense or enter (except as subject matter) into science. On this view the problem of the relation of fact and value statements is meaningless, or at least is not worth considering further.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , April 1943 , pp. 124 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1943

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References

1 As evidenced, for instance, by the joint meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Philosophical Association, held at the University of Pennsylvania, December 1940, to consider the theme “Science and Value”; and also by the inclusion, in 1941 for the first time, of papers on “values” in the program of the International Congress for the Unity of Science. The present paper, in slightly different form, was read at the latter meeting, at the University of Chicago, September 1941.

2 Cf., for example, R. Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax (London, 1935), pp. 22–26; and B. Russell, Science and Religion (New York, 1935), p. 247.

3 J. Dewey, “Theory of Valuation,” International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, II, No. 4 (Chicago, 1939).

4 Ibid., pp. 22–23.

5 Ibid., p. 52.

6 C. W. Morris, “Foundations of the Theory of Signs,” International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, I, No. 2 (Chicago, 1938); and “Esthetics and the Theory of Signs,” Journal of Unified Science, VIII (1929), 131–150. See also C. L. Stevenson, “Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms,” Mind, 46 (1937), 14–31.

7 In this usage, reference to “objects” (actual or conceived things, events, acts, or the like) is called empirical; reference (actual or implicative) to other statements or signs within a particular language context and system is said to be syntactical; and reference (expressed or not) to the purpose or purposes which the statement serves or is intended to serve, and which purpose or purposes determine or help to determine the character of the statement, is called pragmatic or technic.

8 L. Bloomfield, “Linguistic Aspects of Science,” International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, I, No. 4 (Chicago, 1939), p. 47.