Abstract
The ‘value-free ideal’ has been called into question for several reasons. It does not include “epistemic values”—viewed as characteristic of ‘good science’—and rejects the so-called ‘contextual’, ‘non-cognitive’ or ‘non-epistemic’ values—all of them personal, moral, or political values. This paper analyzes a possible complementary argument about the dubitable validity of the value-free ideal, specifically focusing on social sciences, with a two-fold strategy. First, it will consider that values are natural facts in a broad or ‘liberal naturalist’ sense and, thus, a legitimate part of those sciences. Second, the paper will not reject the value-free ideal; rather, it will construe this ideal in a special way, not casting values aside in sciences, but bringing them to the table and rationally discussing them. Today’s predominant naturalistic view has tended to ‘naturalize’ values by looking for physicalist explanations for them—a move resisted by defenders of normativism in social sciences. At the same time, a contending ‘liberal naturalist’ stream has emerged, claiming that not all natural entities can be explained by the methods and concepts of physical sciences, and favors a non-materialist naturalism which includes mind, consciousness, meaning and value as fundamental parts of nature that cannot be reduced to matter. Hence, it may be posited that non-epistemic values could be ‘naturally’ included in the field of human sciences.
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Notes
These different denominations of epistemic and non-epistemic values correspond to some differences in the characterization of them. See for example Rolin (1998) for the difference between McMullin (1983) and Longino’s (1990) characterizations. However, the very distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values is debatable (on this, see Lacey (2017) and Rooney (2017)).
This is a bit of a paradox, as, given that the source of normativity is value, the value-free ideal is itself a value—albeit an epistemic one. For Chang (2013, 2) and ‘value-centrist’ advocates, values are the direct ‘key’ to normativity. In the editor’s introduction to his book on normativity and naturalism, Mark Risjord notes, ‘contributors to this volume do not distinguish systematically between norms and values. Henceforth, the qualifier “… and values” will be dropped’ (2016b, 7). For Joseph Raz, values recognized by people are reasons and become normative (Raz 2010, 22)—i.e., Raz regards values as indirect sources of normativity. He asserts: ‘Values whose existence does not depend on the culture of rational creatures are values and have instances, whether or not people are able to perceive and respond to them as values. Our rational capacities enable us to recognize and respond to reason-constituting facts; as reflective powers, they enable us to improve our understanding of what makes those facts what they are, and how best to identify them for what they are’ (2010, 22).
Anderson (2004) also refers to the incompleteness of induction when she states, ‘Even if we grant that no substantive value judgment logically follows from any conjunction of factual statements, this merely puts value judgments on a logical par with scientific hypotheses. For it is equally true that there is no deductively valid inference from statements of evidence alone to theoretical statements. Theories always logically go beyond the evidence adduced in support of them. The question of neutrality is not whether factual judgments logically entail value judgments, but whether they can stand in evidentiary relations to them’ (2004, 5).
Rouse (2008) argues that, more than anti-supernaturalist, this kind of naturalism is anti-humanist.
We must distinguish between reductive and non-reductive naturalism. In its several forms, including eliminative naturalism and identity theory, reductive naturalism posits that all that exists is or can ultimately be reduced to (and explained in terms of) material stuff. The latter, instead, tries to recognize an independent status to mental realities, relying on theories like emergentism or the idea of supervenience. However, given that these theories regard mental realities as stemming from the physical realm, it remains is unclear whether they are really non-reductive (see Gasser and Stefan 2007, 175), or if, underscoring independence, they are dualist. The position held in this paper—natural liberalism– is more akin to a theory like Aristotelian hylomorphism. FitzPatrick (2008, 197–202) outlines an interesting approach, viewing supervenience in the context of the existence of moral values and assigning a metaphysical value-laden character to natural empirical facts associated with them. Thus, supervenient values do not stem only from a physical reality because a value element stands at their very metaphysical root. Corradini’s (2017) proposal of an ‘essentialist theory of nonnatural normative supervenience’, which considers the nexus between the subvenient and the supervenient as determined by the essence of the latter, may also prove interesting. I cannot delve into these difficult topics here. I have discussed them more extensively in my article 2017a.
As Timothy Williamson asserts, ‘it is not self-evident that there cannot be things only discoverable by nonscientific means, or not discoverable at all’ (2014, 29).
Jennifer Hornsby (who calls it ‘naïve naturalism’, 1997), Barry Stroud (‘a more open-minded or expansive naturalism’, 1996, 54), Peter Strawson (‘liberal’, ‘Catholic’ or ‘soft’ naturalism, 1985, 1 and 42), Johannes Brandl (‘a modest form of naturalism’, 2007, 256) and James Griffin (‘an expansive naturalism’, 1988, 51).
Though her argument follows a different path, I think that the following passage by Christine Korsgaard conveys this attitude quite eloquently: ‘For it is the most familiar fact of human life that the world contains entities that can tell us what to do and make us do it’ (1992, 108).
Baker (2014) argues why a ‘robust first person perspective’ (‘the ability to refer to oneself as oneself’) cannot be described by natural sciences, which are entirely formulated in third-personal terms.
There is a debate between normativists and non-normativists. Here I do not automatically identify normativists with liberal naturalists, because, as described by Turner (2010), for most non-normativists, normativists are anti-naturalists (referring to scientific naturalists). ‘Normativity’, Turner (2010, 5) asserts, ‘is the name for the non-natural’. Risjord (2016b, 9, my italics) explains: ‘Normativists – or at least some of them – claim to have a non-natural motivator that actually accounts for action…’ Liberal naturalists, instead, follow another ‘strategy,’ broadening the scope of naturalism. I think that this strategy is better because it does not leave values in a mysterious limbo. A non-normativist, Turner argues that, for normativists, ‘[values] exist, if they exist, in a special nether world’ (Turner 2010, 191). However, normativists and liberal naturalists share their opposition to scientific naturalism as an exclusive means to explain human reality and as the belief that the physical realm encompasses all of reality. Yet, when normativist Joseph Rouse speaks about ‘practices’—‘in which human organisms and discursively articulated environments are formed together through an ongoing, mutually interactive reconfiguration’ (2016, 38)—as ‘ends’ or ‘energeia’ in the context of a naturalist position, he is in a certain way enlarging the scope of naturalism, going beyond what is merely physical. For Karsten Steuber, facts are not intrinsically normative but become normatively relevant in social contexts. Associating his proposal with Adam Smith’s notion of the ‘impartial spectator,’ he asserts that ‘normative reasons are not queer facts or queer properties. Rather, they are rather ordinary facts and properties (…) that are grasped from within the impartial spectator perspective as considerations that speak for adopting certain attitudes’ (2016, 109). This view may be linked to McDowell’s notion of ‘second nature’. Most normativists tend to consider that normativity stems from social relations (see for example Okrent 2016; Risjord 2016a). However, some norms could also stem from the very human nature.
Along the history there have been different versions of the ideal of the unity of science, and we can also distinguish analytically different concepts of it. For a review of this topic see Jordi Cat (2017). Here I refer to the version corresponding to the subjects dealt with in this paper. For a criticism of the unity of science ideal from an analysis of the naturalist position see Gasser and Stefan (2007, pp. 166–7).
Values can be moral or not—aesthetic, intellectual, cultural values, for example. For a recent essay on values, see Rescher (2017).
According to Rescher (2017, 12), ‘G.E. Moore did not serve the interests of philosophical clarity at all well in adopting the contrast terms “natural/non-natural” to characterize a distinction for which, on his own principles, the less question-begging contrast sensory/non-sensory or perceptual/non-perceptual would have been far more suitable’. However, Moore is not non-cognitivist, but cognitivist (see Putnam 2017a, b, 35).
FitzPatrick (2008, 184–185) describes non-natural facts as ‘facts that cannot be cashed out in empirical terms, as by appeal to facts of psychology or biology, or to complex facts constructed entirely from such facts’.
Note that he calls it ‘scientistic’ not ‘scientific’ (more on this in the next section).
Nagel (2012, 6) argues against both ontological and epistemic materialist naturalism: ‘It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked-out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a scheme for explanation’ (see also Nagel 1998 and Nagel 1986, 51–53 on consciousness as an irreducible aspect of reality). However, as Gasser (2017, 2) explains, Nagel (1986) does not commit to a notion of values that goes beyond the material realm.
Here an introduction to some Aristotelian concepts is advisable. ‘Nature’ comes from ‘natura’, the Latin translation of the Greek ‘physis’. Aristotle, in his first book of Metaphysics (I, 3), reviews Pre-Socratic philosophers’ views on the nature of the physis and argues that, for them, the origin of all things was material. He then presents his take on a teleological view of nature that includes non-material elements, adding the formal and final cause to the material and efficient cause. The current view of nature as only material is similar to the primitive, pre-Socratic, pre-metaphysic notion of reality. Indeed, Dilworth characterizes the physicalist worldview as materialist and mechanistic: causality is reduced to empirically observable, efficient and material causes (2006, 57ff. and passim).
For more critical views on Hume’s stance, see Crespo 2017b, 21–24. In the following paragraphs I draw from this book.
Actually, for Joseph Raz, the notion of instrumental rationality is artificial (a ‘myth’): ‘with creatures capable of reasoning about ends, reasoning about means is not distinctive and special, but part and parcel of our general rational functioning’ (Raz 2005, 28).
Guala (2000) also notes that economics works better as a normative rather than a descriptive theory.
Fink (2006) has another interpretation of the Greek concept of physis, based on his analysis of some passages from Plato and Aristotle. However, this is not the place to discuss this difficult topic.
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A primitive version of this paper has been presented at European Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences International Conference, Cracow, 20–22 September 2017 and at the XXIII Jornadas de Epistemología de las Ciencias Económicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 18–20 October 2017.
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Crespo, R.F. Liberal Naturalism and Non-epistemic Values. Found Sci 24, 247–273 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-018-9565-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-018-9565-z