Well, it tends to be used to argue that values are non-cognitive or unfalsifiable if they cannot be directly derived from facts. Isn’t that essentially how the is-ought problem manifests itself? And this, in turn, assumes the primacy of fact, fact that is supposed to already be “uncontaminated” by values, of an “is” or metaphysic that has the upperhand of prior certitude independant of value. One way to implode the dichotomy is to rigorously demonstrate that in many ways what we call the facts inherently are “contaminated” by values. And another way would be to show that what we call values cannot possibly have any origin outside of at least some degree of relation to facts, no matter how indirect or far-removed that may be.
…primacy of fact with regard to questions of fact, sure. Of course that doesn’t mean it has primacy in all regards. All our actions, after all, are driven by values. Hume promoted the is/ought divide, but he also said that reason (which deals with the “is”) is slave to the passions (the source of values).
What do you mean by contamination?
I’m suggesting that there is no “pure” realm of “questions of fact” that is independant of value, that the absoluteness of the dichotomy rests on assuming some realm of “fact in itself” and that if the metaphysic collapses into human experience then “fact” and “value” both inhabit the same space and are inseparably mixed together. If we are working within the realm of human experience, there is no pure “question of fact” that is completely isolated from and subordinates our own presence and goals.
Bound up in, in a mixed relation with.
I know the definition of the word. I’m asking for how specifically fact can be “contaminated” with value in a way in which meaningful, concrete conclusions can be inferred from that state of affairs.
Brainpolice: What reason do you have for believing that factual propositions must be normative? Epistemology generally concerns norms of thought, but it does not follow that it is of necessity prescriptive. Occam’s Razor is a good example, as it is often used as a normative assumption ‘you should believe x rather than y’.
However, Occam’s Razor (and all supposedly ‘normative’ epistemological positions) is not necessarily prescriptive. I use epistemology to describe the way I think. There is no justified universal prescriptivist epistemological positions. When I get into epistemology, I am signaling my priors, NOT arguing for any apodictic truth, and any rational epistemologist should agree (see the qualifier, this is not contradictory).
What is my recourse if I reject normativity in epistemology as in ethics? The same recourse we all use when dealing with solipsists: I ignore them. However, I think the vast majority of people share the same priors and cannot change the way we think. Assuming intellectual honesty (a 1 to 1 mapping of professed beliefs and actually held beliefs), non-prescriptivist epistemology should not be a problem.
I’m essentially questioning the notion of epistemology as a foundation or something that comes before ethics and aesthetics, similarly to how metaphysics came to be displaced by epistemology as “1st philosophy”. This isn’t to say that I’m taking the step of concieving of ethics and aesthetics as “1st philosophy”, but proposing that the foundational order that we tend to assume obscures what is more accurately a complex web of interrelations between fields/disciplines in which.
Epistemology and positive science are not separable from ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, etc., when one views the whole. The facts, the epistemes, cannot be isolated from what are essentially the cultural (value-laden, ideological, instrumental, political, etc.) influences and motivations that at least partially determine them. The modern enterprise of science is not outside of the scope of this. It is not over and above or unaffected by the cultural and philosophical landscape that it inhabits. What it affirms is not constituted by a special class of facts that is especially “pure” and contrastable with a lower class of propositions that have a “human face”.
This is the sense in which I say that factual propositions aren’t a fully distinct type. The temptation to absolutely demarkate this in favor of particular disciplines and proclaim everything beyond its set margins to be outside the scope of truth and/or meaning, to establish a philosophically constructed absolute mantle of science that separates it from and subordinates everything else in order to permanently classify what can and cannot be said with any degree of certitude according to a set critieria matching a particular type within a particular discipline, is just positivism all over again.
Thinking is an action, and all actions are impelled by values. So, yes values motivate thoughts, but that doesn’t mean the motive of the thought and the object of the thought are indistinct. Causal relation does not imply indistinct characteristics.
I’m saying that values aren’t absolutely separable from the episteme in that both of them are dependant on each other, and that there is no such thing as a workable criteria for determining what counts as a “pure” object of thought in order to dismiss explicit propositions of value as absolutely separate from “fact”.
Such a dualism and the point at which you draw its borders is an arbitrary philosophical construction that places absolute borders between categories where none really exist. It functions to serve the purposes of those that wish to denigrate the enterprise of things like ethics on the grounds of a mantle of science that is fully autonamous in its scope - essentially predetermining what is and isn’t allowed to be cognitive according to a particular subset of knowledge and its methods.
Sure, but how does…
… necessarily follow from that?
It’s not arbitrary, but neither is it a philosophical construct. It just so happens to be the logical structure of our minds. Inferences involving existential propositions simply make sense to the human mind, as do verifications and falsifications of existential propositions. But the human mind simply cannot make sense of “is/ought” hybrid syllogisms or the notion that such value statements as “Cheese is delicious” or “Filesharing is evil” can be verified or falsified (which doesn’t mean people don’t try).
Brainpolice: What problem do you see with epistemology as I use the term, which is non-normative but merely descriptive of why I believe? Can you try and use clear language with examples; I am not new to philosophical terminology and am relatively well-read in the literature, I can understand Quine’s Philosophy of Logic and have read Hume, Carnap and Ayer to name but a few, and yet I find your posts practically indecipherable. I think I understand what you are saying, although if I do I am not convinced that you are saving moral realism or normativity from arbitrariness and Occam’s Razor.
is/ought is purely arbitrary. In this possible world it is a fact that when somebody tries to murder somebody it is a fact that the victim is trying to stop the potential murderer. It is a fact that there is a conflict over property, ie. person. It is a fact that it is being resolved between the two. It is a fact that logic in accord with empirical evidence is on the side of the victim. It is a fact that the victim or the murderer will overpower one or the other. It is a fact that after it is all over logic is still on the side of the victim in the minds of others and the murderer was special pleading. It is a fact this possible world was dealing with an ethical situation. It is a fact that ethics this wasn’t a purely personal ethical situation. There were factually more than one person involved. It is a fact that each individual sustained or attacked using their personal moral agent.
You are making no sense here.
Engineering is an application of science.