Fact and Value

Transcription

[music] >>HILARY PUTNAM: I don't know what the big questions in philosophy are but I know that for me now, the idea that values, the fact-value dichotomy since 1976, really, I've had the idea that the fact-value dichotomy is the most really dangerous legacy of logical positivism. Which means not just that there's a difference between factual judgments and, so-called factual judgments and so-called value judgments. Sure, there's a difference although not one difference or differences depending upon which quotes value judgment and which quotes factual judgment, what you're talking about. But the so-called fact-value dichotomy or distinction has really become a thesis, the thesis that values are subjective. And that has had, that's an example of a thesis that started in pure philosophy and then came to have an enormous impact, first on economists, who are not un-influential, by the way. I mean, as I point out in my book The Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy, Lord Lionel Robbins who was at that time maybe one of the most influential economists in the world, opposed welfare, redistribution of income at the heart of the depression, the great depression of 1929 on the grounds that interpersonal comparisons of utility were meaningless and anyway that presupposes value judgments and value judgments are outside the scope of rational argument. So this is, we're talking here about a case where the problem with just giving up on philosophy is bad philosophy is omnipresent. You know, if we gave up talk -- if we professional philosophers gave up talking about philosophy, your novelists wouldn't, your physicists wouldn't, your biologists wouldn't, your self-promoted god-knows-whats wouldn't and we would be deluged in nonsense. We will be deluged in nonsense but at least there have to be some still small voices like the boy saying the emperor has no clothes saying that's nonsense, you know. And that ahs a whole, that rests on a whole bunch of debatable or false assumptions and don't take that as self-evident. And so there at least in our time I think, and this is something where I, why Dewey is one of my major heroes. I think that the idea that there can be responsible inquiry into value questions and without being a reversion to fundamentalism or a reversion to a priori philosophy. This is why I say that Dewey is for me the beginning or the hope or the promise of what I call a third enlightenment. The first being Plato in the Euthyphro or the Republic. The second being the enlightenment of the seventeenth, the Lumiere, the seventeenth century, eighteenth century and, but I think Dewey is trying to create a more fallibilistic enlightenment than the eighteenth century enlightenment or the Platonic enlightenment. One more in keeping with the, what he called the democratic faith. That‚'s a role. I mean obviously there are -- I believe in purely intellectual questions, you know, what is, what to say, you know, what the heck is going on in set theory still fascinates me and it's one of the hardest intellectual questions there is. What the heck is going on in quantum mechanics. And I think philosophy is only healthy when it simultaneously investigates questions of pure intellectual interest or that seem at least at the time to have only a purely intellectual interest and questions which obviously have immense practical importance at a particular time. That was what Plato did. That was what Aristotle did. That was what Kant did. That's what Dewey did. And, you know, that is my model. W have, sure, we needn't be ashamed of investigating a question which has no practical importance, like the foundations of set theory of the foundations of quantum mechanics. But we, but we can't only be doing that. [music]