Alle Publikationen
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2016
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(2016): Logical Dualism. Human Values and Method in the Social Sciences. In: Cultural Hermeneutics 2 (1), S. 61-73. DOI: 10.1177/019145377400200103
Abstract: The process of erosion undermines our sense of values. To seek what we depreciate gives much meaning and purpose to value and to avoid what we human life. Yet all this may be illusory. To be sure, it is a fact that human beings make value judgments. But that specific individuals value specific things is as open to scientific explanation as is everything done by humans. What is valued has nothing to do with the intrinsic excellence of the object, it may be only the reflection of one’s genetic make-up, of laws of learning and conditioning, of habits that we had no choice in acquiring. And if this is so, then moral goodness, aesthetic excellence, political justice are not ideals worthwhile in themselves, but mere projections of inevitable feelings caused by unchosen factors. Values, in that case, are just labels for things we cannot help liking or disliking.
2015
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(2015): Whose social values?. Evaluating Canada’s ‘death of evidence’ controversy. In: Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (3), S. 404-424. DOI: 10.1080/00455091.2015.1079003
Abstract: With twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of science's unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the spectres of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of recently expressed concerns regarding Canada's death of evidence controversy. The worry, raised by Stathis Psillos, is that as constructivist accounts of science demoted the previously secure status of evidence for drawing justified conclusions in science, we were left with no rational delineation between the right and wrong values for science. The implication for the death of evidence controversy is that we may have no rational grounds for claiming that the Canadian Government is wrong to interfere with scientific enterprise. But he does offer another avenue for reaching the conclusion that the wrong social values are directing the current stifling of some sectors of Canadian science. Psillos draws from standpoint epistemologies to devise a salient defence of "valuing evidence' as a universalizable social value. That is, government bodies ought to enable scientific research via adequate funding as well as political non-interference. In this paper, I counter that (i) non-epistemic values can be rationally evaluated and that (ii) standpoint epistemology's universalizable standpoint provides an inadequate framework for negotiating social values in science. Regarding (i), I draw from the evidence-based medicine debate in philosophy of medicine and from feminist empiricist investigations into the science-values relationship in order to make the argument for empirically driven value arbitration. If social values can be rationally chosen in the context of justification, then we can have grounds for charging the Canadian leadership with being "at war with science'. (ii) I further argue that my recommended empiricist methodology is preferable to Psillos's search for universalizable perspectives for negotiating social values in science because the latter method permits little more than the trivial conclusion that evidence is valuable to science.
Keywords: Begründungsdiskurs, Disziplin, Gründe, kanada, Philosophie, values AND social, Werte, Werte, konstruktivismus -
(2015): The Social Value of Non-Deferential Belief. In: Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (1), S. 131-151. DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2015.1049625
Abstract: We often prefer non-deferential belief to deferential belief. In the last twenty years, epistemology has seen a surge of sympathetic interest in testimony as a source of knowledge. We are urged to abandon epistemic individualism' and the ideal of the autonomous knower' in favour of social epistemology'. In this connection, you might think that a preference for non-deferential belief is a manifestation of vicious individualism, egotism, or egoism. I shall call this the selfishness challenge to preferring non-deferential belief. The aim of this paper is to meet the selfishness challenge by arguing that non-deferential belief is (pro tanto) socially valuable.
2009
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(2009): Core Social Values in Contemporary Societies. In: Diogenes 56 (1), S. 53-73. DOI: 10.1177/0392192109102155
Abstract: This essay intends to build an analytical tool for understanding social values. It proceeds by defining the term 'social value', differentiating 'core' and 'non-core' social values and discussing their respective functions in society. Then, it extracts from social values a seven-tier system of core social values, built on seven basic social relationships: self-other, man-nature, individual-community, community-society, people-government, people-(state) nation, and (state) nation-world system. The corresponding views of right and wrong on these types of relationships are 'core values' and concern perceptions of morality, nature, groups, society, politics, nation, and the world. The very core of the construct is the universal morality of human beings, and the outermost tier is the perception of world affairs. In a further section, the functional connection between the tiers is explored, to show how a core value system collapses. Lastly, the author presents a rudimentary idea of how a core social value system might be built or rebuilt.
2006
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(2006): Epistemic Value Theory and Social Epistemology. In: Episteme 2 (03), S. 177-188. DOI: 10.3366/epi.2005.2.3.177
Abstract: In order to guide the decisions of real people who want to bring about good epistemic outcomes for themselves and others, we need to understand our epistemic values. In Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman has proposed an epistemic value theory that allows us to say whether one outcome is epistemically better than another. However, it has been suggested that Goldman's theory is not really an epistemic value theory at all because whether one outcome is epistemically better than another partly depends on our non-epistemic interests. In this paper, I argue that an epistemic value theory that serves the purposes of social epistemology must incorporate non-epistemic interests in much the way that Goldman's theory does. In fact, I argue that Goldman's theory does not go far enough in this direction. In particular, the epistemic value of having a particular true belief should actually be weighted by how interested we are in the topic.
2005
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(2005): HEGEL's SOCIAL THEORY OF VALUE. In: The Philosophical Forum 36 (3), S. 307-331. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9191.2005.00205.x
1999
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(1999): Justifying Reasons for Valuing. An Argument Against the Social Account. In: The Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (1), S. 141-158. DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.1999.tb00861.x
Abstract: We value many things: friendships, careers, hobbies, character traits, and moral ideals. In at least some cases, we take ourselves to have reasons for valuing what we do. We believe, for example, that there are considerations that justify our devotion to teaching, or our admiration of a person with integrity. I might justify valuing one friendship rather than another because the one friend is sympathetic and fun, while the other is someone with whom I have very little in common. One philosopher might take her devotion to her career to be justified because she finds philosophy stimulating and fulfilling, while another may decide that she no longer has a reason to devote herself to philosophy because she has begun to find her research meaningless and boring. Most of us take the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. devoted his life to improving his community as a reason to admire him. But we do not take the fact that Bill Gates devotes his life to amassing wealth as a reason for admiration. It is intuitively plausible that there are some constraints on what reasons we can sensibly offer to justify these attitudes we have. It does not make sense, one might think, to admire someone’s greed or vanity. That a certain career is unfulfilling and tedious is a reason not to care about it. Not just any consideration counts as a reason that can justify the evaluative attitudes we have. But if there are such constraints on reasons for valuing, what are they? What standards are there for what we can rationally value?
Keywords: Berechtigung von Wertannahmen, Disziplin, Philosophie, Überblick, values AND social, Werte 1967
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(1967): The experience & judgment of values. In: The Journal of Value Inquiry 1 (1), S. 24-37
Abstract: The Experience & Judgment of Values 25 we can attain factual knowledge and the subject- matter of normative reference. Facts deal with the so-called objective world of external objects and events which we can observe in common, and about which we can discourse and formulate verifiable statements. Values, on the other hand, are quite a different matter. They concern a region beyond the range of scientific scrutiny, the realm of the noumenal, or they derive from intangible, incommunicable subjectivity. Whatever their locus, values elude all attempts at proving and establishing them as a body of knowledge to which we must assent on the same logical grounds as we assent to factual statements. I should like to take issue with the assumption underlying this position, the presumption that those situations that involve considerations of value differ sharply from those that are concerned with factual …
1966
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(1966): Rationality and Social Value in Game-Theoretical Analyses. In: Ethics 76 (3), S. 215-220. DOI: 10.1086/291588
1964
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(1964): Game Theory and "Social Value" States. In: Ethics 75 (1), S. 36-39. DOI: 10.1086/291518
Abstract: N HIS article, "Reflections on Game Theory and the Nature of Value" (Ethics, Vol. LXXII [April, 1962]), Rob- ert Paul Wolff takes the position that "'game theory is capable of providing a formal analysis only of those situations in which egoistic values are to be maximized." He further believes that "the game- theoretic concept of strategy, with its postulation of value-maximizing monads, cannot helpfully be applied to the prob- lems of realizing social values." It is my contention that Wolff's position involves a misunderstanding about the use of strategy -s a criterion of value. As a result, his taper shows that the application of game theory to "'social values" cannot be denied .or the reasons that he gives. Wolff takes "social values" to refer to those "valued states and experience" where the value in question depends upon the existence of some form of social inter- action. He gives as examples of social values "freedom of speech," "love," and "economic co-operation." These, he says, belong to that class of values "quite dis- tinct from the egoistic values" to which he thinks the application of game theory is limited. Game theory, as Wolff explains it in a footnote, is a way of understanding that, when parties are engaged in a problem, each has before him branching sets of alternatives
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