Facts and Values

This collection offers a synoptic view of current philosophical debates concerning the relationship between facts and values, bringing together a wide spectrum of contributors committed to testing the validity of this dichotomy, exploring alternatives, and assessing their implications. The assumption that facts and values inhabit distinct, unbridgeable conceptual and experiential domains has long dominated scientific and philosophical discourse, but this separation has been seriously called into question from a number of corners. The original essays here collected offer a diversity of responses to fact-value dichotomy, including contributions from Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam who are rightly credited with revitalizing philosophical interest in this alleged opposition. Both they, and many of our contributors, are in agreement that the relationship between epistemic developments and evaluative attitudes cannot be framed as a conflict between descriptive and normative understanding. Each chapter demonstrates how and why contrapositions between science and ethics, between facts and values, and between objective and subjective are false dichotomies. Values cannot simply be separated from reason. Facts and Values will therefore prove essential reading for analytic and continental philosophers alike, for theorists of ethics and meta-ethics, and for philosophers of economics and law.

Giancarlo Marchetti is Associate Professor at the Università degli studi di Perugia, Italy. He is the author of Il neo-pragmatismo (1999) and Verità e valori. Tra pragmatismo e filosofia analitica (2008), and co-editor of Il Pragmatismo. Dalle origini agli sviluppi contemporanei (2015). Sarin Marchetti is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy. He is the author of Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James (2015) and William James (2017), and co-editor of Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Great Divide (2017).

Behind and Beyond the Fact-Value Dichotomy Giancarlo Marchetti and Sarin Marchetti Part I: A Counter-History of the Dichotomy 1. The Fact/Value Dichotomy and the Future of Philosophy Hilary Putnam 2. Pragmatic Constructivism: Values, Norms, and Obligations Robert Schwartz 3. Contingency and Objectivity in Critical Social Theory: Horkheimer and Habermas Maeve Cooke 4. From the Positivismusstreit to Putnam: Facts and Values in the Shadow of Dichotomy John McGuire Part II: Varieties of Entanglement 5. Reflections Concerning Moral Objectivity Ruth Anna Putnam 6. On Mattering Naomi Scheman 7. Change in View: Sensitivity to Facts and Prospective Rationality Carla Bagnoli 8. Normativity without Normative Facts? A Critique of Cognitivist Expressivism Alex Miller 9. The Evolutionary Debunker Meets Sentimental Realism Mauro Rossi and Christine Tappolet 10. How to Be a Relativist Kenneth Taylor Part III: Some Applications 11. Science and the Value of Objectivity David Macarthur 12. The Environment and The Background of Human Life: Nature, Facts, and Values Piergiorgio Donatelli 13. Fact/Value Complexes in Law and Judicial Decision Douglas Lind