The Collapse of the Fact Value Dichotomy and Other Essays

207 Pages·2004·3.64 MB·English

by  Hilary Putnam

THE COLLAPSE OF THE
FACT/VALUE DICHOTOMY
AND OTHER ESSAYS
INCLUDING THE ROSENTHAL LECTURES

THE COLLAPSE OF THE
FACT/VALUE DICHOTOMY
AND OTHER Ess/ws
|-|||_ARY PUTNAM
T HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright 2002 by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Putnam, Hilary
The collapse of the fact/ value dichotomy and other essays/ Hilary Putnam.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-00905-3
1. Values. 2. Facts (Philosophy) 3. Welfare economics. 4. Sen, Amartya Kumar.
I. Title
B945 .P873 C65 2002
121 '.8--dc21 2002068617
Designed by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt
FOR VIVIAN WALSH
In gratitude, not just for suggestions, criticism, and encouragement, but ]%r
fiendship and wonderful conversations during almost hay' a century

it PREFACE
ii PART | OF 'rms vo|_uMt consists of the lectures I gave at
the invitation of the Rosenthal Foundation and the Northwestern
University School of Law in November 2000. These lectures spell
out the case against the fact/ value dichotomy as that dichotomy
has historically been developed and defended and explain the signif­
icance of the issue particularly for economics. I know but aware of
my own limitations did not try to document, that very similar is­
sues arise in the law
During the ten years that Arnartya Sen was my colleague at Har­
vard University I came to appreciate not only his brilliance (which
was to earn him the Nobel Prize in economics shortly after he left
Harvard for Trinity College, Cambridge) and his idealism, but also
the importance of what he calls the “capabilities” approach to wel­
fare economics to perhaps the greatest problem facing humanity in
our time, the problem of the immense disparities between richer
vm | PREFACE
and poorer parts of the globe. At the heart of that approach is the
realization that issues of development economics and issues of
ethical theory simply cannot be kept apart. Sen, throughout his
career, has drawn on both the resources of mathematical econom­
ics and the resources of moral philosophy including conceptions of
human flourishing.
Yet most analytic philosophy of language and much analytic
metaphysics and epistemology has been openly hostile to talk of
human flourishing, regarding such talk as hopelessly “subjective”­
often relegating all of ethics, in fact, to that wastebasket category
In addition, economics has frequently prided itself on avoiding
“metaphysical assumptions” while positively gobbling up logical
positivist metaphysics-a state of affairs that has been brilliantly an­
alyzed and criticized by Vivian Walsh in Rationality, Allocation and
Reproduction.” Walsh and I have been close friends for nearly fifty
years, and this sorry state of affairs in economics is one that he long
ago called to my attention. When the invitation came from North­
western University School of Law to give the Rosenthal Lectures in
November 2000 it seemed to me-and Walsh powerfully encour­
aged me in this-that this was a perfect opportunity to present a
detailed rebuttal of the view that “fact is fact and value is value and
never the twain shall meet,” a view that implies that the Senian en­
terprise of bringing economics closer to ethics is logically impossi­
ble. This was also an opportunity to present a philosophy of lan­
guage very different from the logical positivist one that made that
Senian enterprise seem so impossible. Of course it is clear that de­
veloping a less scientistic account of rationality an account that
enables us to see how reasoning, far from being impossible in nor­
mative areas, is in fact indispensable to them, and conversely un­
derstanding how normative judgments are presupposed in all rea­
soning, is important not only in economics, but-as Aristotle
saw-in all of life.
As explained in the Introduction, besides the Rosenthal Lectures,
which have been only lightly revised (in particular, although they
PREFACE | IX
are now called “chapters” and not "1ectures,” I hope that the reader
will still feel that she is hearing lectures as she reads them), I have
collected here also those of my recent essays that directly bear on
and help to flesh out the arguments of the Rosenthal Lectures.
As always, this book has been closely read by james Conant and
by Ruth Anna Putnam. Their critical questions and helpful sugges­
tions profoundly helped in the revision of the Rosenthal Lectures.
Thus this book really has four godparents: Conant, Sen, Walsh, and
Ruth Anna.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Harvard University, 2002