Hilary Putnam has recently traced the “collapse of the fact/value dichotomy.” He does not deny that there is a distinction to be made, useful in some contexts, between statements of fact and statements of value, especially of ethical value. But he argues that a dichotomy between fact and value is indefensible, and that instead factual description and valuation are “entangled” with one another. A few points of his argument follow.

1) The fact/value distinction arises from Hume’s argument that one cannot derive an ought from an is, and his claim that statements about oughts are not factual but express sentiments. On Hume’s understanding of fact, this makes sense, since he works with a pictorial understanding of fact. Even ideas are for Hume pictorial, since they are only capable of representing matters of fact by virtue of resemblance to those facts. Putnam says that for Hume “if there were matters of fact about virtue and vice, then it would have to be the case . . . that the property of virtue would be picturable in the way that the property of being an apple is picturable.”

2) Two points arise from his discussion of Hume. First, that though Hume made this distinction, he did not thereby conclude - as advocates of a fact/value dichotomy do - that ethical and other valuations are beyond the scope of rational discussion. On the contrary, he wrote a lot about ethics. Second, the fact/value dichotomy depends on this understanding of fact, and even though logical positivists later undermined this picture view of facts, they continued to make the distinction that depended on it. They had to revise their understanding of facts, since by the time of the logical positivists, many widely accepted scientific facts (the existence of atoms and the components of atoms) were outside the realm of observation. Despite these changes in science, logical positivists continued to assume something like Hume’s notion of fact in their theories for “more than a decade.”

3) When Carnap got around to working a new notion of fact into a fact/value dichotomy, he developed it in terms of a distinction between “observational” and “theoretical” terms and statements. But this position was also untenable, falling afoul of the normal uses of words like “cruel” or “irritated.” These are not observational statements; I cannot see the “cruelty,” but only the man beating the child senseless. But to describe someone as cruel is not to make a theoretical statement either. It is not the case that “whenever I describe someone as cruel, or as irritated, I am committed to a ‘theory’ according to which there is a ‘brain-state’ . . . such that all cruel . . . people are in that brain-state, and no one who is not cruel . . . is in that brain-state.” This, Putnam argues, is not scientific, but “science fiction.”

4) The fact/value distinction also depends on the analytic/synthetic distinction, and the notion that this distinction encompasses all possible types of statements. Kant introduced this distinction, but argued that mathematical statements didn’t fit into either category, but were “a priori synthetic” statements. Logical positivists argued instead that logical and mathematical axioms are instead analytic (true by definition) statements. Only synthetic statements are genuinely factual, so the search for fact was also a search for a clear analytic/synthetic distinction. Quine “suggested that the whole idea of classifying every statement including statements of pure mathematics as ‘factual’ or ‘conventional’ . . . was a hoopeless muddle.” If so, then the fact/value dichotomy collapses.

5) From the value side of the dichotomy, Putnam argues that factual and evaluative statements are necessarily entangled. He first notes that “value” statements are not reducible to ethical statements. Judgments about theories and experiments may also be value statements, statements of “epistemic value.” Judging a hypothesis to be “coherent” or “simple” or “plausible” is mking a value judgment, a judgment, as Peirce said, “of ‘what ought to be’ in the case of reasoning.” Putnam also argues that we cannot arrive at these judgments of epistemic value without examining the descriptions to which we assign these values through the lenses of these very evaluations: “if these epistemic values do enable us to correctly describe the world . . . that is something we see through the lenses of those very values .” It’s not the case that we have a way of deciding we have arrived at the truth “apart from our epistemic values” and then independently can test to see “how often choosing the more coherent, simpler, and so on theory, turns out to be true.” The process of telling we arrive at the truth depends on those very values.

6) One effort to retain the fact/value distinction in the face of criticism has been to claim that “thick ethical concepts” (such as “cruel”), which are offered as counter-examples to the fact/value dichotomy (since “cruel” is used both as a descriptive and as an evaluative term, simultaneously), is to suggest that the thick concepts can be “factored” into a pure description and an attitudinal component. Putnam says, among other things, that this response “founders on the impossibility of staying what the ‘descriptive meaning’ of, say, ‘cruel’ is without using the word ‘cruel’ or a synonym.” You can’t say that the descriptive component of cruel is “causing deep suffering,” since suffering may be caused without cruelty (in early medicine, or in dentistry) and “deep” is itself an evaluative and not merely a descriptive term.

7) Bernard Williams has argued for a fact/value distinction on metaphysical rather than epistemological or linguistic grounds. Williams recognizes that we cannot practically avoid terms that include valuations, but argues, based on his physicalism, that “the world as it is in itself, independent of all observers, can be described using only scientific terms.” The world has only primary qualities, which are describable by physics. But this is not, Putnam responds, really a fact/value dichotomy at all, but rather a dichotomy between what is “absolutely” the case and what is true only relative to a certain perspective. Ethical statements, Williams admits, can be true or false, and can be true or false in the same way that common descriptions are true or false (“grass is green”). But they are true or false in the same way because neither provides an “absolute” truth about what is actually the case. The practical import of this theory are dramatic. Vivian Walsh responds: “Economists cannot afford to neglect the failure of an advertising campaign that tried to sell a shade of green which consumers rejected, or the devastating results of a record drought upon grasslands. The things consumers want, or buy, or have produced for them, are chosen or rejected in terms of features that arguably would not appear in ‘completed science’ if it ever should arrive. They live, mov, and have their being, just like those who make moral statements, on the ‘wrong’ side of that dichotomy between ‘finished science’ and everything else that anyone ever says .”