Refutation of Putnam's Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy MCMP – Ethics and Value Theory

Eckehart Köhler (Vienna) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (22 May, 2013) titled "Refutation of Putnam's Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy". Abstract: In 2002, Hilary Putnam shocked philosophers with the story that value terms have “thick” meanings, where facts and values are “entangled”. (“Crime” and “cruel” are especially “thick”.) This phenomenon is easy to explain, since many professionals treat norms factually, e.g. currently “valid” price quotations, whereas a document leaves the deontic modality ambiguous. Those same professionals certainly are able to distinguish the modalities of propositions they use in their professional work for themselves! (E.g., an active legislator can distinguish those bills which he wants passed from bad bills, etc., and similarly in all professions, at least where procedures for norming exist.) Putnam entirely ignores this. Putnam even ignores Decision Theory, where he has done work. This is crucial: standard Bayesian Decision Theory absolutely requires independence of facts and values, since probability and utility must be independent — if they were not, then no one could empirically predict behavior, nor could anyone recommend optimal policy to a client. Putnam got his collapse from Quine’s collapse of the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, and (correctly!) concluded that if the latter fails, so does the former. But since probabili-ties are “orthogonal” to utilities (which we know from their measurement), “Hume’s Law” is valid; and so is the analytic/synthetic dichotomy. I discuss Morton White’s attempt to subsume analyticity under ethical value. Finally, I claim that (Dewey’s and Quine’s) Naturalism collapses once this (empirically real) sensorium for observing normative validity is acknowledged which is separate from sensory perception.