Description
This collection offers a synoptic view of current philosophical debates concerning the relationship between facts and values, bringing together a wide spectrum of contributors committed to testing the validity of this dichotomy, exploring alternatives, and assessing their implications. The assumption that facts and values inhabit distinct, unbridgeable conceptual and experiential domains has long dominated scientific and philosophical discourse, but this separation has been seriously called into question from a number of corners. The original essays here collected offer a diversity of responses to fact-value dichotomy, including contributions from Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam who are rightly credited with revitalizing philosophical interest in this alleged opposition. Both they, and many of our contributors, are in agreement that the relationship between epistemic developments and evaluative attitudes cannot be framed as a conflict between descriptive and normative understanding. Each chapter demonstrates how and why contrapositions between science and ethics, between facts and values, and between objective and subjective are false dichotomies. Values cannot simply be separated from reason. Facts and Values will therefore prove essential reading for analytic and continental philosophers alike, for theorists of ethics and meta-ethics, and for philosophers of economics and law.
Table of Contents
Behind and Beyond the Fact-Value Dichotomy
Giancarlo Marchetti and Sarin Marchetti
Part I: A Counter-History of the Dichotomy
1. The Fact/Value Dichotomy and the Future of Philosophy
Hilary Putnam
2. Pragmatic Constructivism: Values, Norms, and Obligations
Robert Schwartz
3. Contingency and Objectivity in Critical Social Theory: Horkheimer and Habermas
Maeve Cooke
4. From the Positivismusstreit to Putnam: Facts and Values in the Shadow of Dichotomy
John McGuire
Part II: Varieties of Entanglement
5. Reflections Concerning Moral Objectivity
Ruth Anna Putnam
6. On Mattering
Naomi Scheman
7. Change in View: Sensitivity to Facts and Prospective Rationality
Carla Bagnoli
8. Normativity without Normative Facts? A Critique of Cognitivist Expressivism
Alex Miller
9. The Evolutionary Debunker Meets Sentimental Realism
Mauro Rossi and Christine Tappolet
10. How to Be a Relativist
Kenneth Taylor
Part III: Some Applications
11. Science and the Value of Objectivity
David Macarthur
12. The Environment and The Background of Human Life: Nature, Facts, and Values
Piergiorgio Donatelli
13. Fact/Value Complexes in Law and Judicial Decision
Douglas Lind
