Philosophy of Science
2.2 Current Philosophy of Science
As we live and learn, we acquire a large amount of knowledge about the world we live in. The positivists conferred a special status on scientific knowledge, acquired by observation of indisputable facts and built upon by solid logical inference. Intuitively, I feel just as certain about my knowledge that it is wrong to wantonly murder innocents as I do about my knowledge that the walls around me are painted yellow. Positivists sought to show that the first kind of knowledge (of values) was an illusion and “meaningless.”
After describing the “spectacular crash of logical positivism,” and the “shifting sands of philosophical fortune,” Van Fraasen (1980, p. 2) devotes his book to the study of “what problems are faced by the aspiring empiricist today?” (italics in the original). The conclusions are surprisingly weak and tentative, and a far cry from the confident and sharp assertions of the positivists. Philosophers of science have not abandoned the idea of establishing the superiority of scientific knowledge. The editors of the Handbook of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences set out to establish the distinguishing characteristics of scientific knowledge. In a review of this Handbook, Agassi (2009) writes that “it reflects fairly well the gloomy state of affairs in this subfield,” and describes the large number of unresolved controversies in the field.
The Pragmatic Tradition in philosophy was eclipsed by positivism through most of the twentieth century, but is now enjoying a revival. One of the key claims of this tradition is that all of our knowledge (scientific, religious, moral, social, etc.) is similar. Thus, as Agassi (2009) writes, “there is neither need nor possibility to justify science and forbid dissent from it.” Acceptance of this point of view would lead to a dramatic shift in the current methodology of economics – our knowledge of “science” and “values” are based on the same epistemological principles, and hence the exclusion of values from scientific discourse is arbitrary and unjustified. Some object to the idea of the epistemological parity of scientific and ethical theories because they do not see how to explain the possibility of ethical knowledge. Putnam (2002, p 45) raises this objection as the reason the fact/value dichotomy is tempting, and gives a surprising answer:
The very idea of explaining in absolute terms how ethical knowledge is possible … seems to me ridiculous. … it seems impossible to explain how thought, belief, and reference is possible. … Indeed, the long history of failures to explain in metaphysical terms how mathematics is possible, how nondemonstrative knowledge is possible (the so-called “problem of induction”), and so on, suggests that nothing much follows from the failure of philosophy to come up with an explanation of anything in “absolute terms.”
The attempt to keep economics “scientific” and “value free” has meant that values have been buried out of sight in the framework chosen and in the methodology. We will try to dig these values out from underneath the foundations of scarcity.
Agassi, Joseph, 2009, “Current Philosophy of Science,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences Vol 20 No. 10, p 1–17.
A Review of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Michael Hechter, Should Values Be Written out of the Social Scientist's Lexicon? Sociological Theory, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 214-230
Thomas Poell <tpoell@dds.nl>: Nietzsche, Weber and the question of value free social science