Why Values are as objective as facts ?

Pr. Ali Benmakhlouf

MSN department (Material sciences and nanotechnologies)

October 25th, 2023

Contemporary philosophers (Hilary Putnam, Amartya Sen, Louis Dumont) have sought to challenge the fact/value dichotomy, which grants objectivity to facts and says that values just come down to mere subjectivity. It is « the idea that “value judgments are subjective” is a piece of philosophy that has gradually come to be accepted by many people as if it were common sense” (H. Putnam, The collapse of fact/value dichotomy, Harvard University Press, 20002, p. 1). This dichotomy, according to which one cannot infer a “must” (related to values and norms) from an “is” (related to fact), has been traced back to David Hume (18 century). But Hume himself did not put it this way. It was the positivism of the 19th and 20th centuries that gave it great prominence, thinking that there’s no room for argument when values are in question. The philosopher Quine (1908-2000) criticized the positivists, saying that they are dogmatic : “The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale grey lore, black with facts and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones” (W.V. Quine, «Carnap and logical truth » in P.A. Schilpp, ed. The philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, 1963, p.405).