An excerpt from a podcast I was listening to this morning (link below). I was especially happy to hear the last paragraph, which runs contrary to our ‘common sense’ ideals. Dr. Brown’s brief comment highlights something at once crucial and invisible: that facts are the produce of value-laden frameworks, many of which are the progeny of the diverse histories they emerge as modern exemplars of.

This shouldn’t incline us to dismiss facts; but to acquire a more nuanced relationship with the idea. So that we expand our perspective to include the values and frameworks, their biases and omissions (as well as what they correctly assert) in our considerations and thought.

There’s this idea that ‘once we have the facts’ we ‘know what’s going on’. The problem with that is entailed by the question ‘where do we get facts from in the first place’, and, with few exceptions… the fact is this: the process of producing facts is inherently value-laden.

Yet, facts are not supposed to be about values or historical precedents. Yet, they cannot really »not be.

There is no ‘valueless’ position of enquiry. No matter how we try to get rid of the frameworks we use to explore knowledge and the universe, we can’t have ‘no frame’, and that which we include, highlight, exclude, and ignore… all plays into the origin of ‘facts’.

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There’s a traditional view that there’s a distinction between facts and values — it’s the same thing — there’s just a cleavage between the two. And science is totally concerned with the facts; and morality and maybe religion and other things could be concerned with values. The trouble with that view is that too many things in science — it’s messy — there are all kinds of values even in just doing science itself,

So, for instance, I can tell you about how to find out an infinitude of facts. And maybe one of them you might be interested in. So what is the distance between the tip of my nose and the center of mass of the sun? Now I’m going to move. Now I can ask you about the center of mass of your nose, and the center of mass of that guy on the street — from his nose to the center of mass of the moon. You could measure all of those things and they would all be factually correct if you measured correctly.

But after one or two of these — that’s enough and you’re going to make a value choice that pursuing more of these is not worthwhile and that there are other things that are more valuable. So all facts aren’t on a par; some are clearly better than others and you as a scientist are going to make these kinds of value judgments all the time.

And you’re going to make methodological value judgments which are even more important: like you’re going to say okay, I’ve got two theories here which one should I believe? Oh, this one’s simpler — well that’s actually a value judgment: that simplicity is to be preferred to complexity when you’re talking about scientific theories.

So right away so all right so we’ve got these two theories: I choose this one on the basis of simplicity. And now I say oh, well, the facts according to this theory are different than the facts according to that theory. What are the facts?

Well, I’ve just decided on this theory so now I found out what the facts are but it is value-laden in the sense that I’ve chosen this theory on the basis of its simplicity. So you see how the values begin to infect the facts themselves.

And once you get into fairly sophisticated science and method — and you’re making methodological choices about how to pursue this, you’ll find that there’s all kinds of values that are getting tied up in there — and it’s very, very hard to disentangle them. So, in essence no, it’s not possible to derive an ought from an is.

Interviewer: So, in essence, no, you cannot derive an ought from an is.

That’s right, you can’t. On the other hand, the more important question is: can you disentangle your oughts from your ises? And the answer to that question is, I think, no. And so now, making a big fuss about the distinction between is and ought is probably a bad idea.

So when you’re looking at another scientist don’t ask: “just give me the facts”, because a good scientist who has a sophisticated view of this issue would not be able to tell you what are the clear facts — and how much the facts as presented, in fact, depend on value decisions made along the history — the whole history of science up to that point.

— James Robert Brown