Anka’s Reviews > The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays > Status Update

“the reintroduc­tion of ethical concerns and concepts into economic discourse must not be thought of as an abandonment of “classical economics”; rather it is a reintroduction of something that was everywhere pres­ent in the writings of Adam Smith and that went hand-in-hand with Smith’s technical analyses. Adam Smith is being misrepresented by those who would construe him as the prophet of economic man.”

Critique of logical positivists: the language of science is neatly divided into a “factual” part & an “analytic” part, the whole argument for classical fact/ value dichotomy is in ruins. As far as logical empiricism can tell, science might pre­suppose values as well as experiences & conventions. Stop thinking of “value” as synonymous w/ "ethics.” Science does presuppose values— epistemic values.

Anglo­ analytic philosophers continue to think that meaningful language must be understood on the model of the language of physics… The logical positivist fact/ value dichotomy was defended on the basis of a narrowly sci­entistic picture of what a “fact” might be, just as the Humean an­cestor of that distinction was defended upon the basis of a narrow empiricist psychology of “ideas” and “impressions.

The fact that a sentence is initially adopted as a convention doesn’t mean that it doesn’t face the tribunal of experiment on a par with the other sentences of the theory. The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sen­tences. In our hands it changes through arbitrary & deliberate revisions & additions of our own by stimulation of our sense organs. A pale grey lore, black with fact & white with convention