THE COLLAPSE OF THE FACT/VALUE DICHOTOMY AND OTHER ESSAYS HILARY PUTNAM HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, AND LONDON, ENGLAND Copyright 2002 by the Resident FOR VIVIAN WALSH and Mows of Harvard CoUege All rights reserved In gratitude, not justfor suggestions, niticism, and encouragement, butfir hinted in the United States of America fiendship and wondojkl conversations during almost half a century Second printing, 2003 Library of ConpCataloging-in-Publication Data PumPm, Thc collapse of the factfvalue dichotomy and other usays/Wary Putnam. p. an. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-67600905-3 1. Values. 2. Faas (Philosophy) 3. Webeconomics. 4. Sen, Amartya Kurnar. I. Title B945.PE73 C65 2002 121'.8-ddl 2002068617 Designed by Gwen Nefsky Fnnkfcldt Copyright 2002 by the Resident FOR VIVIAN WALSH and Mows of Harvard CoUege All rights reserved In gratitude, not justfor suggestions, niticism, and encouragement, butfir hinted in the United States of America fiendship and wondojkl conversations during almost half a century Second printing, 2003 Library of ConpCataloging-in-Publication Data PumPm, Thc collapse of the factfvalue dichotomy and other usays/Wary Putnam. p. an. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-67600905-3 1. Values. 2. Faas (Philosophy) 3. Webeconomics. 4. Sen, Amartya Kurnar. I. Title B945.PE73 C65 2002 121'.8-ddl 2002068617 Designed by Gwen Nefsky Fnnkfcldt PREFACE I PARTI OF THIS VOLUME consists of the lectures I gave at the invitation of the Rosenthal Foundation and the Northwestern University School of Law in November 2000. These lecms spell out the case against the factlvalue dichotomy as that dichotomy has historically been developed and defended and explain the sigmf- 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 Vlll 1 PREFACE PREFACE 1 IX and poorer parts of the globe. At the heart of that approach is the are now called "chapters" and not "lectures," I hope that the reader realization that issues of development economics and issues of will still feel that she is hearing lectures as she reads them), I have ethical theory simply cannot be kept apart. Sen, throughout his collected here also those of my recent essays that dlrectly bear on career, has drawn on both the resources of mathematical econom- and help to flesh out the arguments of the Rosenthal Lectures. ics and the resources of moral philosophy, includmg conceptions of As always, this book has been closely read by James Conant and human flourishing. by Ruth Anna Putnam. Their critical questions and helpful sugges- Yet most analytic philosophy of language and much analytic tions profoundly helped in the revision of the Rosenthal Lectures. metaphysics and epistemology has been openly hostile to talk of Thus this book really has four godparents: Conant, Sen, Walsh, and human flourishing, regardmg such talk as hopelessly "subjective"- Ruth Anna. often relegating all of ethics, in fact, to that wastebasket category. In addition, economics has frequently prided itself on avoiding Cambridge, Massachusetts "metaphysical assumptions" while positively gobbling up logical Harvard University, 2002 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 irnpossi- 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 Vlll 1 PREFACE PREFACE 1 IX and poorer parts of the globe. At the heart of that approach is the are now called "chapters" and not "lectures," I hope that the reader realization that issues of development economics and issues of will still feel that she is hearing lectures as she reads them), I have ethical theory simply cannot be kept apart. Sen, throughout his collected here also those of my recent essays that dlrectly bear on career, has drawn on both the resources of mathematical econom- and help to flesh out the arguments of the Rosenthal Lectures. ics and the resources of moral philosophy, includmg conceptions of As always, this book has been closely read by James Conant and human flourishing. by Ruth Anna Putnam. Their critical questions and helpful sugges- Yet most analytic philosophy of language and much analytic tions profoundly helped in the revision of the Rosenthal Lectures. metaphysics and epistemology has been openly hostile to talk of Thus this book really has four godparents: Conant, Sen, Walsh, and human flourishing, regardmg such talk as hopelessly "subjective"- Ruth Anna. often relegating all of ethics, in fact, to that wastebasket category. In addition, economics has frequently prided itself on avoiding Cambridge, Massachusetts "metaphysical assumptions" while positively gobbling up logical Harvard University, 2002 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 irnpossi- 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 CONTENTS Introduction THE COLLAPSE OF THE FACT/VALUE DICHOTOMY The Empiricist Background The Entanglement of Fact and Value Fact and Value in the World of Amartya Sen RATIONALITY AND VALUE Sen's "Prescriptivist" Beginnings On the Rationality of Preferences Are Values Made or Discovered? Values and Norms The Philosophers of Science's Evasion of Values Notes Index THE COLLAPSE OF THE FACT/VALUE DICHOTOMY AND OTHER ESSAYS INCLUDING THE ROSENTHAL LECTURES INTRODUCTION I THEIDEA THAT VALUE JUDGMENTSARE SUEIJECTIVE~i6 a piece of philosophy that has gradually come to be accepted by many people as if it were common sense. In the hands of sophisti- cated thinkers this idea can be and has been developed in different ways. The ones I shall be concerned with hold that "statements of fact" are capable of being "objectively true" and capable, as well, of being "objectively warranted," while value judgments, according to these thinkers, are incapable of object truth and objective warrant. Value judgments, according to the most extreme proponents of a sharp "fact/value" dichotomy, are completely outside the sphere of reason. This book tries to show that from the beginning these views rested on untenable arguments and on over-inflated di- chotomies. And these untenable arguments had, as we shall see, important "real world consequences in the twentieth cennuy. 2 I INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 1 3 Although I have criticized the factlvalue dichotomy in chapters married." The logical positivist claimed that mathematics consists of of previous books, this is the &st time I have tried to examine the analytic truths. "Synthetic" was Kant's term for the non-analytic history of the hchotomy from David Hume to the present day, and truths, and he took it for granted that synthetic truths state "facts." to examine its concrete effects particularly in the science of eco- His surprising claim was that mathematics was both synthetic and a nomics.' I chose economics because economics is a policy sci- priori.