When I say that my cat’s name is Vito, I make a factual statement. It describes a state of affairs with seemingly no value judgments involved. The fact that my cat has this name is just that – a value-free fact – and says nothing (cannot say) about what my cat’s (or any other cat’s) name should be. So, there are value-free facts, right?
Philosophically, the distinction (or lack thereof) between statements of fact and statements of value is a topic with a long tradition. For example, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume famously argued that relying on our past experience of how things are (statements of fact) does not rationally justify our expectation that things should be like that also in the future (normative and evaluative statement).
In sociology at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Max Weber insisted that, while recognising the importance of understanding subjective meanings when studying people, social sciences must be value-free and “strictly distinguish between that which exists, and that which ought to be… Weber argued that scientific, historical, and philosophical analysis of a period could never by itself provide the criteria necessary for a definitive solution of evaluative questions, including those of politics.”1
Once again, the idea is that the mere fact that things are the way they are now (or were in the past) does not mean that they ought to be that way. But does this mean that facts – the way things already are – are indeed free from any evaluative and normative elements? Many contemporary philosophers, such as those working in critical phenomenology and hermeneutics, would challenge the assumption of value-free, utterly objective, detached facts in the world of embodied, finite, socially, politically, culturally, and spatiotemporally situated human beings.
Already in the middle of the 20th century, French philosopher Merleau-Ponty observed that, as empirical subjects, we can only know things (all and any) from a particular perspective, which is already grounded in an entanglement of socially instituted norms. Such as: pet cats should have a name and, therefore, my cat has one. Sure, it does not have to be ‘Vito’, we are not determined like that. However, the fact that he has a name is closely intertwined with the socially situated evaluative norm that he should have a name.
“The [fact/value] distinction is heavily criticised, most fundamentally on the ground that it fails to appreciate that the perception of anything as a ‘fact’ may itself involve value-judgements, as may the selection of particular facts as the essential ones. For example, we may say that it is fact that A owed B money, but that it is a value-judgement that it ought to be paid, yet the entire framework of social arrangements within which there arise such things as money and debt is itself a normative construction, and one evidenty endorsed by someone claiming the former fact.”
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (p. 172)
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1Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (3rd edition, 2016)
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