A fact-value dichotomy is pernicious and profoundly (or epistemically, morally, and psychologically) mistaken. While conceptually and otherwise distinguishable, facts and values are best viewed in a necessary or obligatory relation of entanglement. Because fascist and proto-fascist members of the cult of Trump in the Republican Party have played loose with facts since (and to a significant extent before) Trump first campaigned for the Presidency, in other words, because they have ignored or distorted facts, have lied about what is factual, preferring myths, illusions, delusions, and phantasies to a social and ontological reality that is intrinsically connected to determination of what is true, to a concern for what bears a connection to socially supported and warranted or justified facts, there’s been a tendency in mass and social media to rely on and emphasize a rather simplistic or crude or convenient notion of facts that blithely ignores fact/value entanglement if only because it raises philosophical and ethical topics that are not easily addressed in such communicative fora.
Explaining this entanglement involves invoking contested notions of reason, rationality and reasonability; of objectivity, generalization and universalizability; of moral and conceptual relativism or perspectivalism; of truth; of instrumental and intrinsic values; of emotions and passions; and so forth and so on. Moreover, it raises the role played by obdurate prejudices and passions, by “personal affinity, loyalty and affective involvement with individuals and groups” that often display symptoms of mental illness or psychopathology, by ideological allegiances that are close-minded and calcified, relying on what Albert O. Hirschman termed the “rhetoric of reaction” that in turn rests on the theses of “perversity,” “futility” and “jeopardy.” Finally, were we to publicly and sufficiently address the nature of fact/value entanglement we would need to speak to the dispositional preference for that species of wishful thinking that privileges our peculiar or idiosyncratic wants and desires in a manner that runs roughshod over evidence and argument, that habitually indulges in self-deception and denial, that orients itself around a regressive narcissistic hedonism.
The following snippets are intended to serve as an introduction to the topic of fact/value entanglement.
“Recently Iris Murdoch has put forward the view that the whole ‘fact/value’ dichotomy stems from a faulty moral psychology: from the metaphysical picture of ‘the neutral facts’ (apprehended by a totally uncaring faculty of reason) and the will which, having learned the neutral facts, must ‘choose values’ either arbitrarily (the existentialist picture) or on the basis of ‘instinct.’ I think she is right; but setting this moral psychology right will involve deep philosophical work involving the notions of ‘reason’ and ‘fact’ (as she, of course, recognizes).”— Hilary Putnam
“Our knowledge of the world presupposes values, indeed, what comes to count as the real world depends upon our values. This is evidenced in the “implicit standards and skills on the basis of which we decide whether someone is able to give a true, adequate, and perspicuous account of even the simplest perceptual facts….” — Hilary Putnam
“[F]act, (or truth) and rationality are interdependent notions. A fact is something that it is rational to believe, or, more precisely, the notion of a fact (or a true statement) is an idealization of the notion of a statement that it is rational to believe. [….] [B]eing rational involves having criteria of relevance as well as criteria of rational acceptability, and…all of our values are involved in our criteria of relevance. The decision that a picture of the world is true (or true by our present lights, or “as true as anything is”) and answers the relevant questions (as well as we are able to answer them) rests on and reveals our total system of value commitments. A being with no values would have no facts either. The way in which criteria of relevance involves values, at least indirectly, may be seen by examining the simplest statement. Take the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat.’ If someone actually makes this judgment in a particular context, then he employs conceptual resources—the notions ‘cat,’ ‘on,’ and ‘mat’—which are provided by a particular culture, and whose presence and ubiquity reveal something about the interests and values of that culture, and of almost every culture. We have the category ‘cat’ because we regard the division of the world into animals and non-animals as significant, and we are further interested in what species a given animal belongs to. It is relevant that there is a cat on the mat and not just a thing. We have the category ‘mat’ because we regard the division of inanimate things into artifacts and non-artifacts as significant, and we are further interested in the purpose and nature a particular artifact has. It is relevant that it is a mat that the cat is on and just something. We have the category ‘on’ because we are interested in spatial relations. Notice what we have: we took the most banal statement imaginable, ‘the cat is on the mat,’ and we found that the presuppositions which make this statement a relevant one in certain contexts include the significance of the categories animate/inanimate, purpose, and space. To a mind with no disposition to regard these as relevant categories, ‘the cat is on the mat’ would be as irrational as ‘the number of hexagonal objects in this room is 76’ would be, uttered in the middle of a tête-à-tête between young lovers. Not only do very general facts about our value system show themselves in our categories (artifacts, species name, term for a spatial relation) but, our more specific values (for example, sensitivity and compassion), also show up in the use we make of specific classificatory words (‘considerate,’ ‘selfish’). To repeat, our criteria of relevance rest on and reveal our whole system of values.” — Hilary Putnam
“Values enter into the very definition of what a fact is; the realm of facts cannot be defined or specified without utilizing certain values. Values enter into the process of knowing a fact; without utilizing or presupposing certain values, we cannot determine which is the realm of facts, we cannot know the real from the unreal.” — Robert Nozick
“There are a variety of reasons why we are tempted to draw a line between ‘facts’ and ‘values’—and to draw it in such a way that ‘values’ are put outside the realm of rational argument altogether. For one thing, it is much easier to say, ‘that’s a value judgment,’ meaning, ‘that’s just a matter of subjective preference,’ than to do what Socrates tried to teach us: to examine who we are and what our deepest convictions are and hold those convictions up to the searching test of reflective examination.” — Hilary Putnam
“(1) In ordinary circumstances, there is usually a fact of the matter as to whether the statements people make are warranted or not. [….] (2) Whether a statement is warranted or not is independent of whether the majority of one’s cultural peers would say it is warranted or unwarranted. (3) Our norms and standards of warranted assertibility are historical products; they evolve in time. (4) Our norms and standards always reflect our interests and values. Our picture of intellectual flourishing is part of, and only makes sense as part of, our picture of human flourishing in general. (5) Our norms and standards of anything—including warranted assertibility—are capable of reform. There are better and worse norms and standards.” — Hilary Putnam
“The moral point is that ‘facts’ are set up as such by human (that is moral) agents. Much of our life is taken up by truth-seeking, imagining, questioning. We relate to facts through truth and truthfulness, and come to recognise and discover that there are different modes and levels of insight and understanding. In many familiar ways, various values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our world; wherein we constantly evaluate our own values and those of others, and judge and determine forms of consciousness and modes of being.” — Iris Murdoch
“The concept factual judgment or judgment with a truth-value and the concept of ethical judgment will be different concepts—such a distinction is there to be made, just as the concept mouse and the concept mammal are different concepts—but the distinctness does not preclude a judgment’s being both a factual and an ethical judgment. Compare the way in which the distinct concepts mouse and mammal will each collect any particular mouse you please, Timmy Willy or Johnny Town or whichever, within their extensions. Ethical judgments could be a subset of factual judgments even if they were an utterly special and essentially contestable subset. In this way, we can have a clear difference between the ethical-as-such and the factual-as-such without any dichotomy between their property provinces. The hope of making good a claim of this sort is the characteristic hope of ethical objectivism or moral cognitivism.” — David Wiggins
“The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.” — Michael P. Lynch
“Minimally speaking, a proposition is true in the realist sense when things are as that proposition says they are. Some aspect of objective reality must simply be a certain way. If it is, then the proposition is true; if not, the proposition is false. The truth of the proposition hinges on the world alone, not on our thought about the world. In short, realism about truth minimally implies two commitments: (a) truth is an authentic property that some propositions have and others lack, and (b) the concept of truth is, in Putnam’s words, ‘radically non-epistemic;’ that is, whether a proposition is true (in most cases) does not depend on what I or anyone else believes or knows. [….] According to correspondence accounts of truth, there are three metaphysical aspects to any true proposition: the proposition itself (the truth bearer), its correspondence (the truth relation), and the reality to which it corresponds (the truth marker). [….] In other words, propositions are true when they correspond to the facts.” — Michael P. Lynch
“[T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.” — Michael P. Lynch
“[T]he conditions under which a proposition is true are partly determined by the conceptual scheme in which the proposition is expressed. But what makes a proposition true is not its relation to a scheme but whether or not the conditions in question obtain. For a claim to be true (or false), the conditions must be relative to a scheme. Yet the reason that the claim is true is not because it is relative to a scheme (as the truth relativist must hold); it is true because it is the case. [….] A fact, in the human sense, is simply what is the case.” — Michael P. Lynch
“[I]n taking concepts to be flexible and fluid like, the pluralist is not saying that we are confused about our concepts. Rather, the point is that concepts are not absolutely determinate or closed; they do not have a fixed use in every possible situation. This does not imply, however, that no concepts have determinate uses in all actual situations. Some concepts may be perfectly determinate in actual situations, but not in all possible situations. [….] For the pluralist, concepts are … flexible; they are subject to possible extension in the fact of unforeseen circumstances. Hence, there can be irresolvable disagreements over how to apply any concept. In a sense, concepts are therefore always possibly vague in a nonpejorative sense; they have what Waismann called ‘open texture.’” — Michael P. Lynch
“Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.” — Michael P. Lynch
“Truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have. Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property that makes a proposition good to believe.” — Michael P. Lynch
“All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.” — Michael P. Lynch
“Deflationists are right to be skeptical of the thought that any one traditional theory of truth can tell us what all and only true beliefs have in common. At a suitable level of abstraction, understanding what true beliefs are simply involves simply understanding what they do—their role in our cognitive economy. To play this role is to satisfy certain truisms, truisms that display truth’s connection to other concepts. It is this truth-role that gives truth its unity; the features that are constitutive of this role are what true propositions have in common, and simply having those features is what we ordinarily mean by saying that a proposition is true. But not all facts are exhausted by the truisms. One such fact is that there is more than one property that make beliefs true. Truth … is immanent in those other properties of beliefs. In some domains, what makes a belief true is that it corresponds to reality; in others, beliefs are made true by a form of coherence. [….] [Traditional theories of truth] are not best conceived of as theories of truth itself. They are better seen as theories of the properties that make beliefs true—or manifest truth.” —Michael P. Lynch
“Truth is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs; our ordinary concept of truth is univocal.” — Michael P. Lynch
“Core Folk Truisms (there may be other truisms): (i) Objectivity: The belief that p is true if, and only if with respect to the belief that p, things are as they are believed to be … is a central truism about truth. (ii) Norm of Belief: It is prima facie correct to believe that p if and only if the proposition that p is true. (iii) Warrant of Independence: Some beliefs can be true but not warranted and some can be warranted without being true. (iv) End of Inquiry: Other things being equal, true beliefs are a worthy goal of inquiry.” — Michael P. Lynch
“A theory of truth should make sense of the following metaphysical principle: Truth is One: There is a single property named by ‘truth’ that all and only true propositions share. The theory should also be ‘able to make sense of the intuition that drives pluralism about truth, namely, Truth is Many: there is more than one way to be true.” — Michael P. Lynch
“[T]ruth is a single higher-level property whose instantiations across kinds of propositions are determined by a class of other, numerically distinct properties. [….] Truth is many because different properties may manifest truth in distinct domains of inquiry. In those domains they have the truish features [we find in those folk-truisms enumerated above]. Truth is one because there is a single property so manifested, and ‘truth’ rigidly names that property.”—Michael P. Lynch
Truth is objective; it is good to believe what is true; truth is a goal worthy of human inquiry; and truth is worth caring about for its own sake.
Suggested Reading: There is an enormous number of articles and books one might include here, and while I usually attempt to provide one with a sense of the abundant relevant literature on a particular topic, this time I leave you with but two sources!
- Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2002)
- Rescher, Nicholas. “Value Objectivity,” in his book, Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997): 172-196.
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