I pursue Matt Brown’s (Science and moral imagination: A new ideal for values in science. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2020) and James Leach’s (The British Journal for Philosophy of Science 19 (2): 93–108, 1968a) historical suggestions that there is a relationship between metaethical noncognitivism and certain arguments for the value neutrality of the sciences. In particular, I relate C.L. Stevenson’s emotivism to arguments by Herbert Feigl, Carl Hempel, and Ernest Nagel for the sciences’ value neutrality. I also consider whether these arguments can be disentangled from their controversial metaethical claims by looking at Robert Alexander’s (Philosophical Studies 25 (6): 391–401, 1974) account of value neutrality based on the view that a scientist’s aims are discharged by making empirical statements. Drawing upon Leach’s (The British Journal for Philosophy of Science 19 (2): 93–108, 1968a, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 11 (1-4): 349–367, 1968b) defense of a form of the argument from inductive risk, I argue Alexander fails to offer a metaethically neutral version of the value neutrality of the sciences. Though I do not explicitly explore this, I think the history I sketch is relevant to recent calls for philosophers of science to more fully characterize the ‘values’ in ‘values and science.’

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A History of Metaethics and Values in Science

  • Paul L. Franco

摘要

I pursue Matt Brown’s (Science and moral imagination: A new ideal for values in science. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2020) and James Leach’s (The British Journal for Philosophy of Science 19 (2): 93–108, 1968a) historical suggestions that there is a relationship between metaethical noncognitivism and certain arguments for the value neutrality of the sciences. In particular, I relate C.L. Stevenson’s emotivism to arguments by Herbert Feigl, Carl Hempel, and Ernest Nagel for the sciences’ value neutrality. I also consider whether these arguments can be disentangled from their controversial metaethical claims by looking at Robert Alexander’s (Philosophical Studies 25 (6): 391–401, 1974) account of value neutrality based on the view that a scientist’s aims are discharged by making empirical statements. Drawing upon Leach’s (The British Journal for Philosophy of Science 19 (2): 93–108, 1968a, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 11 (1-4): 349–367, 1968b) defense of a form of the argument from inductive risk, I argue Alexander fails to offer a metaethically neutral version of the value neutrality of the sciences. Though I do not explicitly explore this, I think the history I sketch is relevant to recent calls for philosophers of science to more fully characterize the ‘values’ in ‘values and science.’