The Fact- Value Dichotomy as an Intellectual Prison

DANTE GERMINO TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, the political scientist David Easton made the following observations about the widespread acceptance of the factvalue dichotomy in American social science: This assumption, generally adopted today in the social sciences, holds that values can ultimately be reduced to emotional responses conditioned by the individuals total life-experiences. In this interpretation, although in practice no one proposition need express either a pure fact or a pure value, facts and values are logically heterogeneous. The factual aspect of a proposition refers to a part of reality; hence it can be tested by reference to the facts. In this way we check its truth. The moral aspect of a proposition, however, expresses only the emotional response of an individual to a state of real or presumed facts. It indicates whether and the extent to which an individual desires a particular state of affairs to exist. Although we can say that the aspect of a proposition referring to a fact can be true or false, it is meaningless to characterize the value aspect of a proposition in this way. Eastons inelegant formulation of the logical positivist fact-value dichotomy has the advantage of its brutal frankness. So-called value propositions, do not refer to reality at all. Reality apparently is what we discover by barefoot empiricism, to employ William Glasers felicitous phrase. In any event, Easton tells us, facts and values are logically heterogeneous. This means that were w e to attempt to derive a norm (or value) from a fact (or a part of reality), we should be committing the naturalistic fallacy which forbids us under pain of methodological death to derive an ought from an is. The logic of logical positivism is this: stick to your last and do not mess around in the muck of values and soul stuff.To be sure, each of us could go about parading our value judgments but why should we do so, given that they are our irrational responses conditioned by our total life experiences to a set of real or presumed facts? The profession is interested in our facts not in our psyches, says Easton. As an illustration of the markedly deflationary effect of the fact-value dichotomy on so-called statements of value, I offer the following translation, as it were, of Jeffersonian English into Eastonian political science. Thomas Jefferson, who died in 1825 and of course was benightedly unaware of the fact-value dichotomy, could write: LLWe hold these truths to be sei:-evident: that aii men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Rendered into mainstream political science, Jeffersons words would sound today something like this: We hold these values, which do not refer to a part of reality, and cannot be said to be either true or false, and which can ultimately be reduced to our emotional responses, not to be self-evident of course, but rather to indicate the extent to which we desire a particular state of affairs to exist: that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; except that neither the notion of creation, nor that of a Creator, nor that of unalienable rights is testable. And so, perhaps we might just as well forget the whole thing.

I shall not dwell on ,the obviously nihilistic implications of mainstream social sciences fact-value dichotomy. Many good books have been written on this ~ u b j e c t I .~ did find interSpring 1979

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esting the following observation in Rudolf Carnaps Autobiography offered in rebuttal of the charge that value relativism promotes political nihilism: Someones acceptance or rejection of any particular thesis concerning the logical nature of value statements and the kind and source of their validity has usually a very limited influence upon his practical decisions. The behavior in given situations and the general attitude of people is chiefly determined by their character and very little, if at all, by the theoretical doctrines to which they adhere.4 It is noteworthy that Carnap, once a leading member of the Vienna Circle, here refers to something so untestable by the canons of logical positivism as character, as if it were a fact. However, I am not interested in hunting down all the inconsistencies of advocates of the fact-value dichotomy. Rather I wish to call attention to the defective conception of reality at the basis of the positivist fact-value dichotomy, a conception, I contend, that prevents main~tream~ social science from becoming a critical science of politics in the fully-developed sense. One problem with the mainstream notion of reality is that it cannot account for the larger reality in which the two worlds of fact and value are situated. If factual reality consists of phenomena out there to be observed by a self-conscious observer, there is no provision for the very real capacity of the selfconscious, valuing subject to get behind himself or herself as it were and see the reality encompassing both the observed facts and the observing subject. Nor is there provision for the reality of the interaction between the perceiving mind and the perceived real phenomena. Such considerations as these eventually led Karl Popper, one of mainstream social sciences leading philosophers, to posit a third world beyond that of either objective facts or subjective values.5 Poppers third world construction represents a seemingly important departure from the fact-value dualism to which in one form or another he had long been committed. As de-

scribed by Sir John Eccles, who follows Popper in endorsing the third-world construction, World 1 represents physical objects and states; it is the total world of the materialists. World 2 consists of states of consciousness and subjective knowledge. World 3 represents the whole world of culture, or knowledge in the objective sense.6 For both Eccles and Popper there is a reality resulting from the interaction of objectivity and subjectivity which is not explainable by the fact-value dichotomy. Popper calls the third world the realm of epistemology without a knowing subject. Despite Poppers attempt to move beyond the fact-value dichotomy by positing a third world, he fails to cope with the dichotomys deflationary effect upon all non-empirical discourse. Indeed, in the same volume containing his third-world speculation, he makes clear that he stands by his earlier teaching concerning a line of demarcation distinguishing the statements of empirical science from non-empirical statements. As the philosopher Henry Veatch has noted, in claiming to solve the so-called problem of demarcation, Popper appoints himself a kind of pope to oversee the proper drawing of the line. Veatchs remarks on this subject will only lose in paraphrase, so let us hear him directly : Time was when only a pope was deemed a fit officer to draw a line of demarcation; but nowadays this onetime papal function would appear to have devolved upon an unblushing and ever ready Sir Karl. Moreover, he would appear to have confidently drawn his line in such a way that on the one side are to be reckoned all of those enterprises that are properly scientific in character, and scientific just in the sense that they place their reliance upon the hypothetico-deductive method; and on the other side of the line, there would seem to be ranged an indeterminate and somewhat motley crew of enterprises-some of them resembling metaphysical speculation, others being perhaps clsssifiable as religious discourse or theological argument,

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others reminding one of ethical or aesthetic judgements, and stillothers as amounting to little more than projects of ordinary, everyday human reflection and discussion. By and large, enterprises of these latter kinds are scarcely marked by any exclusive or even precise reliance upon the hypothetico-deductive method. But if they do not rely upon the proper and distinctive method of science, then all such enterprises as lie on what we might refer to as the far side of the line of demarcation cannot possibly claim to be scientific. And if not scientific, then can they claim to be even properly cognitive enterprises at all? True, Popper himself has always refused to go along with. the old-line positivists and simply write off metaphysics, theology, ethics, et a l . as meaningless. But while not meaningless, it is still questionable whether metaphysical language, religious language, and, for that matter, any and all forms of non-scientific discourse can be regarded as properly informative or descriptive. Interesting. suggestive, inspirine they may well be at times, but do they convey knowledge? Likewise, as regards truth, while there might be some hesitation in denying flat-out that metaphysical statements or religious affirmations or even such statements as may be implicit in poetry or in art generallywhile it might be going too far to say that statements of these varying sorts are incapable of being either true or false, still it would seem that such truths as are to be relegated to the far side of the line of demarcation can hardly claim to be truths of fact or truths about the world in the way scientific truths are.* Not surprisingly, Popper attempts to positivitize, as it were, the contents of his third world, calling it the realm of objective knowledge. In this way, World 3 can fall mainly on the positive side of the line of demarcation and count as something empirical and objective, even though it perforce contains elements of subjectivity. Thus, even poetic thoughts and works of art are subsumed under World 3, which comprises the world o f objective con-

tents of thought. (Poppers italics.) To summarize, Poppers three worlds are: World 1:the physical world; World 2: the world of our conscious experience; and World 3: the world of the logical contents of books, libraries, computer memories, and such like. Compared with the Eastonian mainstream fact-value dichotomy, Poppers third world construction marks a tiny opening of the door toward the multidimensional reality which must be the basis of any critical science of politics and society. It is interesting to note what convolutions scholars who accept the fact-value dichotomy as their starting point have to go through in order to produce even a tiny chink in the prison. Other movements such as the Frankfort school have attempted to arrive at a different solution to the factvalue problem. Some of these attempts have been discussed by Richard Bernstein in a book which also implicitly accepts the regnant factvalue assumption as the starting point for a critique and for what he calls a restructuring of social and political theory.1 However, such a restnirtiiring as Remstein describes amounts only to a shuffling around of the furniture in the same warehouse (or lets say in the same minimum-security prison). Eric Voegelin has penetrated to the core of the problem. As he wrote in The New Science of Politics:

The notion of a value-judgment . . . is meaningless in itself; it gains its meaning from a situation in which it is opposed to judgments concerning facts . . . and this situation was created through the positivistic conceit that only propositions concerning facts of the phenomenal world were objective, while judgments concerning the right order of the soul and society were subjective. The classification made sense only if the positivistic dogma were accepted on principle. . . . . 11 The language of values serves only to prevent the development of a critical science of politics. Such a science would need as its starting-point an openness the experience of the order of Being, an order which is not created by man, but within which man finds

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himself situated. The language of Being arose out of the quest by the noetic philosophers in Greece for the ground of their being and of all being. The language of Being is ignored or twisted beyond recognition by the language of values; hence we need to jettison the language of values and attempt to recover the language of Being before we can move forward to develop a critical political science adequate for our own time. As we know, Popper lays great stress on openness; yet in the language he employs he himself is closed to the experience of creatureliness. Popperian man is pictured as facing a phenomenal reality external to him upon which he projects his values and in interaction with which he creates a third world of culture or objective knowledge. Thus, he describes his third world as a man-made product.12 It is true that Popper struggles to get out of the positivist prison into which he voluntarily put himself by also recognizing that there is something super-human and autonomous, something that transcends its makers13 in the Third World idea. What he is presumably attempting (despite the dead weight of the fact-value dichotomy) to articulate is the experience of nonmetric, spiritual reality, a reality that cannot possibly be accommodated within the fact-value universe. For experiences of spiritual reality (or nonmetric reality to use Arthur Eddingtons term) are supposed to be on the deflationary side of the line of demarcation, are supposed not to have truth-content, are supposed not to be empirical. In other words, such experiences for Popper can only be made real by being objectified into a world of the logical contents of books, libraries, computer memories and such like. In Objective Knowledge Popper even cites the very Plat0 he had so mercilessly savaged in his open society book as the philosopher who, for all his e~~entialist errors, might lead us back to a language of the reality not accounted for in the language of values. l4 Struggle as he does, however, Popper cannot bring himself to break through and re-enact within himself Platos experience of the reality of human existence in the Metaxy or the Between. For all

his attempts at revising the inadequacies of the fact-value language, Poppers man remains facing the reduced reality of the neopositivists. All he has accomplished is to have added a realm of cultural facts (in the creation of which his Pelagian-like individuals have had a share through their self-conscious interaction with the physical world and with the realm of objective knowledge) to the physical facts of the positivists. I wish to conclude with some brief observations on the requirements for a critical science of politics in our time. Such a science would be open to the language of past searchers for reality (not the positivist reality but the reality experienced by the whole human being). It would learn as much from an Egyptian hymn or a Buddhist prayer or a Biblical text or a Platonic dialogue as it does from the pages of the Congressional Record or the New York Times about what constitutes the political reality i n which we all participate. In its language a critical science of politics would not mirror the very world-the modern world-which it is supposed to interpret. It would know itself to be a science-a form of knowledge-rather than a mere blik (as the fact-value dichotomy implies). It would be able to identify and expose ideological second-reality constructions for the threats that they are to the freedom of the spirit and the dignity of the person. It would also know its limitations and have no more illusions than did positivisms greatest representative, Max Weber, about offering up recipes for practice for the specific problems of the day. Its knowing would be a questioning knowing and a knowing questioning. I contend, then, not as my private blik or value-judgment but as a matter of record, that for there to be a critical science of politics there must be openness on the part of its practitioners to the reality of the Between in which we participate and to the search for the ground of Being. Such a conslusion may sound dogmatic and arbitrary. For those who wish to pursue the search, however, there exists a rich body of literature which they may use to help them to re-enact within themselves the experiences of reality to which the language of Being refers.5*

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*This article is drawn from a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, held in New York City in September of 1978. David Easton, The Political System (New York, Knopf, 1953), p. 221. If by the naturalistic fallacy one means deriving an ought from an is, the positivists themselves are guilty of committing it. They assume reality to be split between fact and value with the subjective valuing individual as the source of norms rather than factual reality itself. Thus, they accept as real the fact that the individual is the source of norms rather than, say, the community orthe traditions of a civilization. In truth, there is no way of avoiding the fallacy. Positivists argue that reality is such that the individual imposes hisvalues on the real world: Le. the positivist assumes that he ought not to regard values as derivable from reality. In any event, the problem of a critical science of politics is not to avoid deriving an ought from an is, but to strive to see that the ought in question is derived from what truly, enduringly, and ultimately is rather than from the Zeitgeist or some evanescent and perhaps brutally successful fact. If by is one means merely what exists as a brute fact in the phenomenal world, then no one but a clod or a time-server would favor making that the source of the ought. When Thomas Aquinas wrute that bonum et em convertuntur, he did not mean by is what merely exists. Indeed, what other source can there possibly be for a n ought that is authoritative for us than that it may be derived from the ultimately true is, or the order of Being? Of course, vast opportunity for error inkeading the Order of Being exists, which is why the ought is better expressed in the language of the sense of movement toward reality or the ground of Being than in apodictic statements. The pre-analytical quality of openness to the quest for (enduring) reality is presupposed for a n y valid ethical language; such openness is the sine qua non for avoiding

megalomaniacal ideological constructions and selfrighteous repressiveness, both of which ignore the truth of mans creatureliness, imperfection, and finitude. The man who presumes to measure must experience himself as measured by aTruth which his judgments may at best only approximate. 3See, for example, John H. Hallowell, Main Currents in Modem Political Thought (New Yurk: Holt, 1950). Chapten 9 and 10 and the literature cited there are particularly relevant, as is his article Politics and Ethics, XXXVIIIAmrican Political Science Review (August, 1944), 639-655. 4Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf C a m p (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1963), p. 82. This is from Camaps Intellectual Autobiography, pp. 3-84. 5Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolruionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 111. 6JohnEccles, The Understanding of the Brain (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973). p. 193. Popper, op. eit., p. 12, n. 19. *Henry Veatch, A Neglected Avenue in Contemporary Religious Apologetics, 13Religiow Studies (1977), 29-48 at 31-32. BPopper, op. cit., pp. 166,74. loRichard J. Bernstein, TheRestructioningof Social and Political Theory (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) for the latest criticism of mainstream social science. Some of the leading contemporary political philosophers who point the way beyond the language of values are not even discussed by Bernstein. For example, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin are not even cited, which is rather odd for a book on the restruce w turing of political thought. Eric Voegelin, The N Science of Politics (Chicago: 1952), p. 11. 12Popper, op. cit., p. 158. 131bid., p. 159. Ybid., pp. 122, 158. 15See in particular Eric VoepelinsOrrlPra d H k t q (4 v n ! l ~ ~ e s , LSU Press, 1956-74) and my article Eric Voegelins Framework for Political Evaluation, 72 APSR (March, 1978), 110-121, and the literature cited therein. Voegel i d s theory of experiences of reality and their symbolization has been further developed in essays to be published in Order and History, Volume V (forthcoming).

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