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The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays
The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays Author:Hilary Putnam Although it is on occasion important and useful to distinguish between factual claims and value judgments, the distinction becomes, Hilary Putnam argues, positively harmful when identified with a dichotomy between the objective and the purely "subjective." Lively, concise, and wise, his book prepares the way for a renewed mutual frui... more »tion of philosophy and the social sciences. "Hume's and much 20th-century moral philosophy contrasted moral with factual judgments and led people to conclude that the former, unlike the latter, are subjective in the sense of not being rationally supportable. Putnam … believes that the contrast is ill conceived and that the conclusion is both unwarranted and false. He acknowledges the usefulness of the fact/value distinction but denies that anything metaphysical follows from it … Putnam covers such matters as imperative logic, economics vis-à-vis ethics, and preference theory and such thinkers as V. Walsh, L. Robbins, and R. M. Hare. A fine philosophical workout." —Robert Hoffman, Library Journal« less