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Four Contributions Values Can Make to the Objectivity of Social Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Sandra G. Harding
Sandra G. Harding*
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
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Extract

In his intellectual autobiography, Rudolf Carnap describes a dispute between Otto Neurath and the rest of the members of the Vienna Circle.

All of us in the Circle were strongly interested in social and political progress. Most of us, myself included, were socialists. But we liked to keep our philosophical work separated from our political aims. In our view, logic, including applied logic, and the theory of knowledge, the analysis of language, and the methodology of science, are, like science itself, neutral with respect to practical aims, whether they are moral aims for the individual, or political aims for a society. Neurath criticized strongly this neutralist attitude, which in his opinion gave aid and comfort to the enemies of social progress. We in turn insisted that the intrusion of practical and especially of political points of view would violate the purity of philosophical methods, (p. 23).

Type
Part VI. Aspects of Rationality
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1978 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1978 , 1978 , pp. 198 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

The author wishes to express gratitude to the University of Delaware Research fund for support of part of the work associated with this paper, and to John Connolly for helpful comments.

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