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The Fact/Value Dichotomy: Revisiting Putnam and Habermas

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Abstract

Under the influence of Hilary Putnam’s collapse of the fact/value dichotomy, a resurging approach that challenges the movements of American pragmatism and discourse ethics, I tease out in the first section of my paper the demand for the warranted assertibility hypothesis in Putnam’s sense that may be possible, relying on moral realism to get rid of ‘rampant Platonism’. Tracing back to ‘communicative action’ or the Habermasian way that puts forward the reciprocal understanding of discourse instigates the idea of life-world as composed of ‘culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretative patterns’, this section looks for whether Habermas’ psychoanalysis of prolonged discussion can accord with Putnam’s thick ethical terms or not. The last section of the paper pitfalls Putnam’s stance to accepting Habermas’ ‘discourse ethics’ that centers around the context of entangling ‘rational thoughts’ to ‘communication’, but he introduces the idea of fallibilism in a rational query that also attacks the Habermasian metaphysical idea of the validity of ethical statements that goes towards the truth. My next attempt is to see whether Putnam’s objective dictum towards morality that resonates the collapse of fact/value dichotomy from a universalistic stand can successfully evade Rorty’s naive realism (structured by linguistic representation) and Habermas’ ‘sociologism about values’ (a kind of minimalist ethics depending on solidarity) respectively. This sort of claim insists on a universalizable pattern of culture-relative value. I consider that the idea of a fact/value dichotomy engages with the inextricable entanglement between the normative and descriptive content, besides the epistemic values having exclusively intertwined with the structure of factual discourse that intends towards collapsing the fact/value dichotomy, a subjective universalizability predilection.

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Notes

  1. Actually, for Hobbes, there is a very faint distinction we may draw between the moral and legal values, but it is true that the position that culminates a distinction between them is doubtlessly the idea of ‘defenders’, viz., the legal values have the propensity that can continue the defenders in the question of justice and injustice as ordered by the sovereign, whereas the defenders cannot continue his/her defence regarding the right or wrong of their perspective on moral values as it have no interrogate connection to the sovereign’s proclamations. I assume that the legal values are more objective that have the stability stand, but moral values are more subjects centric, so it may be changeable according to the situation.

  2. William James thinks, ‘In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative. We add, both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really mallable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hand... Man engenders truths upon it.’ (James 1981: 115)

  3. I am personally thankful to my mentor Hilary Putnam for this valuable comment.

  4. More explicitly, a transcendental-pragmatic analysis that depends on the self-reflexive sort of presupposition-analysis chiefly exposes that in the practice of argumentation in communicative action, the certain normative proprieties play a pertinent role in which anybody who would like the process of all competent participants to perform as rational evaluators ought to wish for every competent participant to identify as ideally regulating through their discursive commitments. Here reasons are assessed by the reasonable assessors depending on the universalistic rational ethos. (Please see, Apel 1991: 261–78)

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Correspondence to Sanjit Chakraborty.

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Chakraborty, S. The Fact/Value Dichotomy: Revisiting Putnam and Habermas. Philosophia 47, 369–386 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9977-6

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