The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy

The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy

Hilary Putnam

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press 2002

Reviewed by Bing Liu, Erasmus University Rotterdam

ABSTRACT

This paper explores one published article by the American philosopher of science Hilary Putnam, “The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy’. In this article, Putnam criticized the arguments for the fact/value dichotomy using different ways that relate to the background of empiricist. This paper mainly examines Putnam’s criticism and idea of the fact/value dichotomy in order to fully understand why and how the fact/value dichotomy should be collapsed.

It has a long history for people to consider that value and fact are distinct. It is a dogma in philosophically important aspects that objective truth only predicts fact, not value, namely value judgment cannot possibly be a statement of fact. Value judgments are radically different from factual judgments, that they are ‘subjective’ in a way that factual judgments are not. (Putnam, 2002)

Before Putnam explicated the dichotomy between facts and values in detail, he firstly used another similar claim which is the distinction between analytic and synthetic to explain his view. According to the latter one, positivists believed that every true judgment must be either analytic or synthetic. Analytic proposition is a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept, while synthetic proposition is not. That is, analytic judgments are those which are true simply in virtue of their meaning or tautologies, while synthetic judgments are not. (Kant, 1998) Value judgments are substantial claims, so they are not analytic. However, synthetic judgments can only be determined by empirical test and we cannot test truth judgments empirically, so they are not synthetic either. (Long, 2006) In addition, the logical positivists introduced three categories of judgments: “synthetic”, “analytical” and “cognitively...