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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
In this paper, I want to discuss the recent attempts by Professor John R. Searle to cast doubt on the traditional empiricist distinction between fact and value. Searle's first attack on this distinction was made in 1964 in his now classic article, “How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’.” In that paper, he presented what he claimed to be a counter-example to the thesis that statements of fact may not entail statements of value. Searle's argument aroused much controversy and inspired many attempted refutations, but Searle apparently found none of these convincing, for a few years later he published a revised version of his paper as the last chapter of his book, Speech Acts. The new version includes his replies to many of the objections which had been made to his thesis up to that time. It also includes, in the main body of the book, a theory of language which is supposed to provide the theoretical underpinning explaining why his original paper presents a genuine counter-example to the position he is attacking. It is the Speech Acts version of Searle's thesis which I want to consider here.
This paper, with minor changes, was read as part of a symposium on “is/ought” held at the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association in Montreal, June 1972. Carl Hedman and Cedric Evans made helpful comments on an early draft, and Alice Koller gave careful and constructive criticism of a late version.
1 Searle, John R. “How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’,” Philosophical Review, 73 (January 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Searle, John R. Speech Acts, An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press, 1969.CrossRefGoogle Scholar All page references are to this edition.
3 Searle’s account of the distinction between brute and institutional facts is given on pp. 50-3 of Speech Acts.
4 After all, as long as we follow Searle in not limiting our examples to moral ones, it is easy to invent sentences containing the word “ought” which do not express evaluations. Think, for example, of the sentence, “He ought to be back soon,” where the speaker means something like, “I expect him back soon,” or even, “All being well, he will be back soon”. Indeed, Searle’s own analytic premise, “One ought to fulfil one’s obligations”, may be taken as an example of a non-evaluative statement which has “ought” as its main verb.
