Abstract:
Hillary Putnam is one of the contemporary philosophers who study the fact/value dichotomy. In his thoughts, these two concepts are interpretation and even conceptually not separate, a notion named instructive pragmatism. He accuses the advocates of this dichotomy and believes that when they say morality is separate from fact, they base their trust on the supposition that they realize fact in its exact sense. He sets three reasons that lead to resorting to this dichotomy of reality/value and by rejecting all, paves the way for his criticism of this dichotomy. The drawbacks recognized by him in this context, consist of 1. conversion of a non-destructive distinction into a destructive metaphysical dichotomy, 2. The impact of science from the values in generating science, 3. existence of consensus regarding ethical issues similar to that of other domains, 4. inaccuracy in the analysis of moral judgment into the two perspective and descriptive components, 5. wrong moral thick concepts, a reason in the interpretation of facts and values. Next to accepting his thoughts, and strong points in rejecting fact/value dichotomy, we believe when he defends the character of constructive facts, the following deficiencies become evident in his views: 1. inaccuracy in changing facts due to the conceptual schema, 2. the problem of backward causation, 3. lack of conceptual competence, 4. problem of incoherence and 5. use mention fallacy. The objective of this paper is to analyze and assess the strong and weak points of Putman’s views on fact/value dichotomy.
Machine summary:
Keywords: Fact/value dualism, non-cognitive moral knowledge, thick ethical concepts, pragmatism, constructivism of reality, Putnam Corresponding author: a.
2. Putnam; The Problem of Fact/Value Throughout the twentieth century, when analytic philosophy was at its peak, philosophers tended to incessantly comment on scientific and moral propositions as two separate domains.
From the perspective of these philosophers, who mostly leaned towards the non-cognitive theory of cognition 1 in ethics, only scientific propositions are descriptive and deal with the expression of facts, and are capable of being objectively characterized by truth and falsity, whereas moral propositions lack these characteristics.
In short, proponents of this dualism have enumerated emotive 2, sentimental 3, prescriptive 4, subjective 5, and relative 6 characteristics for values; however, Putnam opposed their view regarding the separation of fact from value.
Putnam also addresses this point in the book Pragmatism: An Open Question 6 and considers the explicit rejection of many famous dichotomies, namely fact/value, fact/theory 7, and fact/interpretation 8, to be the most important characteristic of the philosophy of William James 9 (1842-1910), in such a way that James describes them as entangled and interdependent 1.
Dualisms such as mind and body, mind and world, observation and theory, truth and convention, analytic and synthetic, fact and value are examples of these dichotomies that Putnam criticizes during different periods of his intellectual life (-Ben Menahem 2005: 13).
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