Value, Truth and Fact

As a latecomer to philosophy (I waited until retirement, after 30 odd years of working, before re-engaging actively with philosophy, both contemporary and historical), I've had to play catch-up. It meant reading a lot of stuff I'd missed after graduating college, and learning (and re-learning) things I'd otherwise forgotten -- or missed entirely. It meant wrestling with philosophers at a depth I hadn't engaged in for decades despite having kept up a passing interest in the field, reading sporadically when I had the time. But at a certain point we start to feel caught up and, while I am certainly no expert in all fields, I've been pretty well steeped in one, Ethics, a philosophical concern that's interested me since my late undergraduate days so that I now hold some well-formed views on the subject.

No, I don't claim to be an expert on every ethical theory or meta-ethical account but I'm pretty well steeped in the stuff by now. And have reached a point where there's not that much that's new to me -- or at least it no longer seems like there is. There are still fine points to be explored and domains to be further explicated, and areas on the edges of ethics which remain fuzzy in my own mind. I'm particularly interested in the nexus of the subjective, as in how WE feel about things, and the objective, as in how publicly available evidence tells us things are. Can evidence imply oughts for us? Contra the likes of David Hume, I think it can and have got to the point where I'd argue that, in fact, facts are not divorceable from values as Hume supposed, but are intricately connected to them. In the late Hilary Putnam's words, facts are entangled with values. But how?

Putnam argued that you can't take values out of fact claims, nor can you remove such claims from the valuational sort. Aside from the obvious here, that we value things in the world, thus facts, as claims about what's true about the world, are relevant to every valuational claim we make, there is the further important point that fact claims are, themselves, valuational at bottom. Truth claims, which apply to facts, are especially so in complex matters, like theorizing, as we see in the sciences (the quintessential domain of facts). As Putnam reminded us, theories in science are not just about what's true in the simple sense of correspondence between statements and the things they are statements about. Science deals with elaborate stories concerning how things are, how they come to be and how, when we meddle with them, they respond. Scientific theories are not like simple claims of fact, confirmable or disconfirmable by taking a look. They involve judgments about what theories are the cleanest, the least encumbered by irrelevant, or perhaps even risky intellectual detritus likely to put other well-established beliefs we hold in jeopardy. Such judgments are about which theories are simplest, most elegant, most consistent with other things we hold to be the case (and so require the least alteration of other beliefs we already hold). Claims made in and via theories about the world are susceptible to judgments about their coherence, their elegance, their simplicity . . . and these ARE value terms.

Science, as the pursuit of knowledge about the tangible world, the world we can observe via our senses, is about developing beliefs which fit with things we already think we have reason to take to be true. And judgment, the assessment of those reasons, is no less valuational than moral claims are. It's just that scientific pursuits, the search for truths about the world, rely on different facts: the publicly observable sort which others can see and agree to. Moral truths, on the other hand, which also involve observations of course, look elsewhere, i.e., they oblige us to consider what is the case about ourselves and, by extension, others who are selves like us. They require attention to a concept rather than something we can see in the world and the concept is that of selfhood, i.e., what we understand about ourselves, our own way of being in the world. Rather than to theories about how things are as in scientific questions, moral questions focus on how we are. Moral valuation has a different target than the valuing we usually think of as truth-making. Its ground is the concept of what we, ourselves are, in this case of being a self, a subject in a world.

This is not something that's observable through our senses but through the concept of selfhood we are obliged to develop as we become increasingly self-aware in a cognitive way. The concept of selfhood is different from concepts about how the world works because it's built into the way we see the world. We are part of how the world works of course because it works for us, for selves seeing it. This concept of selfhood is implied by the very nature of seeing a world at all. And so we recognize subjectness as a characteristic of what we are, of being entities with wants and needs relating to the things in and of the world. Here seeing subjectness as our own condition leads us to see that it's not just something connected to our own experience but is manifest in the activities of others with the same capacities we have, the same awareness of selfhood. We see persons, that is, not just physical objects in motion -- even if it's through the physical appearance of actions that we see them as something more than walking and talking pieces of meat. Moral valuation rests on this realization that it is persons, subjects like ourselves, who share the world with us. And seeing this subjectness we can come to understand its particular and peculiar status and thus that we also have a reason to behave differently towards the other than if we saw only a physical entity akin to any other object in our world.

Moral valuation is about discovering this fact of personhood and about coming to see what and who we take persons to be, about how they relate to their world, including to others like themselves who share it. Moral valuation arises when we recognize the presence of others like us in the world but this doesn't mean they are not facts about our world in the way the color of the sea is, or the rain that falls is. It just means that different factors matter in recognizing and assessing persons. We see, through the physical aspects of their presence in our world, something else and, to the extent we do, we have facts we can agree or disagree on no less than we agree or disagree about the sky's color or the arrival time of the next flight to Aruba. Persons and their status, their condition, how they stand in relation to their world, are facts no less than the other furnishings of the world are.

Moral valuation is thus about facts, too, but of a different sort, i.e., about a fact embedded in the concept of selfhood itself. Moral valuation, unlike other forms, rests on the recognition, and especially the elaboration, of this phenomenon of being a self, a fact that is grounded in the concept of selfhood which creatures like us are enabled to develop at a cognitive level of awareness thanks to the capacities vouchsafed us by language and the discursive thought it makes possible.

Facts and values are entangled, as Putnam put it, for we cannot recognize a fact without valuing the claims we make about it, nor can we value anything without the occurrence of facts to be valued. But some of the facts we recognize are conceptually embedded and not just out there in the world. Ethics, moral valuing, rests on claims about which we may argue and disagree no less than the claims we make about the nature of the world we can see with our eyes, hear with our ears, etc. But in the case of ethics the argument involves getting clear on the nature of what we ourselves are. It's about exploring and clarifying a concept or set of concepts rather than taking in sensory stimuli.

If we're subjects, and others are, what must we do to relate to such entities in ways that recognize that? Finding agreement about ethics, no less than about the observable sensory world, rests on sharing beliefs about how things are. In the case of ethics, it means developing common beliefs about us, as valuing creatures with all that being a valuing creature entails, beliefs not simply reducible to the sensory inputs that constitute our observations but about the implications of the concept of selfhood, of self aware subjectivity. It's about seeing and dealing with what it is that makes us what we are, creatures with motives and intentions. It's about deciding which actions are to be preferred and why. Facts are not only reducible to what is seen or not but also to how we understand the things seen -- and this means to what is embedded in the concepts within which we see things. In our case it's what is implied by having the ability to hold and share concepts -- notions about things -- something which cannot happen if we could not engage in the activity of valuing in the first place.

But, once we can value (which is a cognitive function of our language-enabled discursive capacities not available to other sentient creatures as far as we know), we also learn to value what it is that makes us what we are. We learn to turn the valuing mechanism embedded in discursivity on ourselves, the valuer, as well. We can, that is, value ourselves no less than the things that affect us. This is accomplished by attention to the concept of selfhood once we begin to encounter it, to coming to grips with its underlying subjective nature. If truth claims are value claims, made possible by our capacity to use language to sort phenomena into observable chunks, then, among all the things we value, or can value, are the selves we take ourselves to be, as well. And so we can and do develop ideas about what it is to be a better or worse self and these are facts about us.

All the world we know, which is discovered through our capacity to turn sensory inputs into concepts (and which has no existence as a world outside of this), rests on valuing, no less than it rests on having the inputs we collect and organize into worldly stuff. Moral valuing is just a sub-species of valuing generally. It cannot be peeled off from the rest, to be discarded as mere subjective fantasy even as we continue to take seriously the claims we make about the world we observe through our senses.

This is what I've come to see by spending the past few years rediscovering the thinkers and thoughts that once consumed me but which I set aside when I left the university and entered the world. Valuing is a -- no it is the -- foundation of rationality itself and, more, of our particular human capacity to have and live in a world and not just a mere environment of stimuli as other creatures do.