Putnam on Dewey on Values
In this post written much earlier this summer, I made a push for the very unpopular ('round here) view of instrumentalism about truth. One of the objections presented was that it "simply pushes the skeptical problem back a step and into the realm of values."
I have a lot of respect for this objection. Personally, it was my reaction to pragmatism a year and a half ago. (Personal musings here) However, with the help of Hilary Putnam's "Are Values Made or Discovered?" in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays and his account of Dewey's metaethics therein*, I've found an articulation of what may be a solution, as well as a more general account of ethical epistemology, which is something I've been needing for a long time.
Part of Putnam's essay is dedicated to the epistemological problem of ethics: how do we know what is valuable? He opens this discussion with a characterization of the crude value-skeptic's position:
"How could there be 'value facts'? After all, we have no sense organ for detecting them. We can say how we detect yellow since we have eyes, but what sense organ do we have for detecting value?"
Putnam asserts that this argument fails because it doesn't take into account the role of concepts in mediating perception. He raises the question "How could we come to tell that people are elated? After all, we have no sense organ for detecting elation." Our having a concept of, e.g., elation, allows us to "see" that someone is elated. Similarly, our having a concept of cruelty, or evil, or kindness--concepts that Putnam would describe as being "entangled" in both fact and value--allows us to detect it in the world. (Which isn't to say that he believes the values exist in the world, as real things. He fights this Neo-Platonist view, while embracing cognitivism about value judgments, in Ethics Without Ontology. I will not, however, go into the metaphysics in this post.)
Contrary to empiricist psychology, pragmatists (whom Putnam allies himself with) and others believe that experience is not value neutral. Rather,
"it comes to us screaming with values. In infancy we experience food and drink and cuddling and warmth as 'good' and pain and deprivation and loneliness as 'bad', as our experiences multiply and become more sophisticated, the tinges and shades of value also multiply and become more sophisticated. Think, for example, of the fantastic combinations of fact and value in a wine taster's description of a wine."
However, just because something is valued (and there are certainly lots of things we value--that is what we mean, in part, when we say that experience is not "value neutral") doesn't make it valuable. If we want there to be a truth as to what is valuable it can't merely be a function of our attitudes at a given time. Enter Dewey.** For Dewey, what makes something objectively valuable are valuations that are subjected to criticism--intelligent reflection by which we determine which valuations are warranted.
So how do we go about criticism of our valuations? Well, first we rock the antifoundationalism, hard:
"In judging the outcome of an inquiry, whether it be an inquiry onto what are conventionally considered to be 'facts' or into what are conventionally considered 'values,' [Putnam has been bashing the fact/value dichotomy throughout the whole book, as could be inferred from the title] we always bring to bear a large stock of both valuations and descriptions that are not in question in that inquiry. We are never in the position imagined by the positivists, of having a large stock of factual beliefs and no value judgments, and having to decide whether our first value judgment is 'warranted,' of having to infer our first 'ought' from a whole lot of 'ises'."
This makes the whole ethical project much easier.
However, Putnam is a little weak on his specification of the criteria we ought to use in evaluating value judgments. He doesn't think we really need to. Rather, he thinks that we can hold fast to the principle (as Dewey does) that "what holds good for inquiry in general holds for value inquiry in particular." And we all know what good inquiry is, right? (In case we don't, Putnam paints an impressionistic picture including Habermasian discourse ethics, experimentation, and observation when experimentation is impossible)
As is characteristic of the recent Putnam I've read, he spends his time building up or restoring a framework for discussion that has tons of potential but doesn't stop to derive any concrete answers. Frustratingly, I think the Deweyan program only guides us through inquiry into the solutions to real problems, which is in a way anathema to the philosophical project which, if not totally abstracted from reality (let's hope it isn't), is in the very least engaged in a kind of pre-processing of ideas. Any ideas about where to go from here?
* Putnam himself is not an instrumentalist about truth any more.
** All attributions to Dewey here are Putnam's, or rather, my understanding of Putnam's.
[x-posted to philosophy]
I have a lot of respect for this objection. Personally, it was my reaction to pragmatism a year and a half ago. (Personal musings here) However, with the help of Hilary Putnam's "Are Values Made or Discovered?" in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays and his account of Dewey's metaethics therein*, I've found an articulation of what may be a solution, as well as a more general account of ethical epistemology, which is something I've been needing for a long time.
Part of Putnam's essay is dedicated to the epistemological problem of ethics: how do we know what is valuable? He opens this discussion with a characterization of the crude value-skeptic's position:
"How could there be 'value facts'? After all, we have no sense organ for detecting them. We can say how we detect yellow since we have eyes, but what sense organ do we have for detecting value?"
Putnam asserts that this argument fails because it doesn't take into account the role of concepts in mediating perception. He raises the question "How could we come to tell that people are elated? After all, we have no sense organ for detecting elation." Our having a concept of, e.g., elation, allows us to "see" that someone is elated. Similarly, our having a concept of cruelty, or evil, or kindness--concepts that Putnam would describe as being "entangled" in both fact and value--allows us to detect it in the world. (Which isn't to say that he believes the values exist in the world, as real things. He fights this Neo-Platonist view, while embracing cognitivism about value judgments, in Ethics Without Ontology. I will not, however, go into the metaphysics in this post.)
Contrary to empiricist psychology, pragmatists (whom Putnam allies himself with) and others believe that experience is not value neutral. Rather,
"it comes to us screaming with values. In infancy we experience food and drink and cuddling and warmth as 'good' and pain and deprivation and loneliness as 'bad', as our experiences multiply and become more sophisticated, the tinges and shades of value also multiply and become more sophisticated. Think, for example, of the fantastic combinations of fact and value in a wine taster's description of a wine."
However, just because something is valued (and there are certainly lots of things we value--that is what we mean, in part, when we say that experience is not "value neutral") doesn't make it valuable. If we want there to be a truth as to what is valuable it can't merely be a function of our attitudes at a given time. Enter Dewey.** For Dewey, what makes something objectively valuable are valuations that are subjected to criticism--intelligent reflection by which we determine which valuations are warranted.
So how do we go about criticism of our valuations? Well, first we rock the antifoundationalism, hard:
"In judging the outcome of an inquiry, whether it be an inquiry onto what are conventionally considered to be 'facts' or into what are conventionally considered 'values,' [Putnam has been bashing the fact/value dichotomy throughout the whole book, as could be inferred from the title] we always bring to bear a large stock of both valuations and descriptions that are not in question in that inquiry. We are never in the position imagined by the positivists, of having a large stock of factual beliefs and no value judgments, and having to decide whether our first value judgment is 'warranted,' of having to infer our first 'ought' from a whole lot of 'ises'."
This makes the whole ethical project much easier.
However, Putnam is a little weak on his specification of the criteria we ought to use in evaluating value judgments. He doesn't think we really need to. Rather, he thinks that we can hold fast to the principle (as Dewey does) that "what holds good for inquiry in general holds for value inquiry in particular." And we all know what good inquiry is, right? (In case we don't, Putnam paints an impressionistic picture including Habermasian discourse ethics, experimentation, and observation when experimentation is impossible)
As is characteristic of the recent Putnam I've read, he spends his time building up or restoring a framework for discussion that has tons of potential but doesn't stop to derive any concrete answers. Frustratingly, I think the Deweyan program only guides us through inquiry into the solutions to real problems, which is in a way anathema to the philosophical project which, if not totally abstracted from reality (let's hope it isn't), is in the very least engaged in a kind of pre-processing of ideas. Any ideas about where to go from here?
* Putnam himself is not an instrumentalist about truth any more.
** All attributions to Dewey here are Putnam's, or rather, my understanding of Putnam's.
[x-posted to philosophy]