Facts and Values

Sraffa was da bomb. “The Production of Commodities by means of Commodities” is a thin little volume that utterly demolishes 95% of what is taught in the average economics department…

Incidentally, the fact-value ‘distinction’ is clearly and self-evidently bollocks

is that a fact?

And a few drops of angoustora bitters.

His voice rose and his Italian accent grew sharper. “Fact, value! Value, fact! Fact, value! Value, Fact! FACT, VALUE! VALUE, FACT!”

damn. why din’t i ever think of that argument?

Sraffa was also a good friend and mentor to Antonio Gramsci; that’s an interesting little triangle right there. Perhaps one of those people whose genius is not so much genesis as catalysis.

But I think the ‘switch’ argument is a bit of a red herring, which may well be Runciman’s subtext. At least the way Weber deployed it, the fact/value distinction was not meant to be a description of an objective state of affairs or even a real possibility, but an ideal type of an ethical relationship to knowledge. The ‘vocation of the scientist’, something like ‘getting it right’. So the idea is that if we can see how values are normally mixed with facts (after first defining our terms, ‘fact’, ‘value’) and correct for that, it might be possible to construct knowledge that achieves a certain reliability and respectability beyond, or other than, the particular identity and/or power of its author(s).

In a wittgensteinian sense the fact/value distinction is accordingly a move in the game ‘science’, and as such a criterion for the production of a certain kind of ‘truth’. So Runciman was quite right, but in a narrow way.

Totally OT for this discussion, but not for this blog:

PhD Comics creator almost deported from the UK.

I value facts. And that’s a fact. (Which I value.)

One of the things that some people have great difficulty with is the fact that there are limits to what can be deduced using a system of logic. They simply cannot process the fact that mathematics does not answer every question of importance.

And so there was that student of Robert Nozick who was trying to establish a logical positivist foundation for Zen Budhism at one time. Now how is that for a koan – beats one hand clapping eh?

Now if we just accept as fact that the deductive power of logic is not going to let us deduce a complete system of ethical values from Peano’s axioms, that we are going to have to bias the system with at least some starting assumptions, we can actually get some useful work done.

If we agree that the starting assumptions might be something we have to agree on through some form of consensus forming process then we may get somewhat further still.

The reason people seem to resist this approach is that it does not offer a result that can be used to beat people round the head who roundly deserve same for pontificating systems of value that range from obnoxious to downright evil. Contrawise, said pontificants despise the approach because it does not give them ammunition.

Seems to me that the real value of this type of debate is that it completely shuts the door on ethical systems whose foundations are ‘theological’. Here I will lump together all arguments that go from a ‘fact’ (e.g. the sun rises each morning) to a ‘value’ (e.g. therefore we have to cut the hearts out of people each night to make sure this continues). While the Mayan priesthood is out of business these days, there are plenty of priests left making similarly spurious arguments.

@salient

Well, err, I took the studio apart for my other video project ‘Phill’s British Workshop’. It is kind of modeled on the New Yankee Workshop, only with slightly more tools and a lot more daleks.

Should be starting up again, maybe.

Now the Ubuntu folk are complaining that the problem I was having was due to my buying the cheapo 650Mb CDR media rather than the 700. Which they might have a point on, only what my real complaint was there was the fact that 90% of sysadmin time is spent dealing with unnecessary problems that are really simple after the fact.

Like who on earth would care about the capacity of CDR media or have noticed that they updated the spec? It is an utterly obsolete format as far as I am concerned. The only time I ever burn a CD or DVD is to install something.

Actually, the QOS I do need to do soon is on the infamous MacBook Air hinge defect which turns out to be a complete design error. Its a doozy of a design error. Basically the MacBook Air will self destruct if you use it on an airplane. If you look at the design of the hinge, there is a cam that stops it opening too far. But when you have the thing fully open (easy on an Air, they don’t open very far) the cam turns into a pivot about which the weight of the display is acting on the hinge with a 1:100 leverage ratio. That means you have 100 times the weight of the display pulling the cheap pot metal hinge apart.

So the weight of the screen vibrating against the cam will basically destroy the hinge after a couple of airplane trips.

Is that a ‘fact’ or a ‘value’? Hey, I am even further off base this time than the first try!

Nah, Macs cost way too much to be considered in the value category.

Hidari:

“also because philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition don’t like the idea that ‘our’ Wittgenstein was influenced by that beastly Marxist nonsense”

In fact, analytic philosophers have long been aware of this influence — how could they fail to be if Wittgernstein himself indicated this in the ‘Investigations’?

I have outlined these influences here:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/Wittgenstein.htm

See also:

Kitching, G., and Pleasants, N. (eds.), ‘Marx And Wittgenstein. Knowledge, Morality And Politics’ (Routledge, 2002).

“FACT, VALUE! VALUE, FACT!”

I am planning to use that during my viva to answer any question on data integrity.

Facts and Values…& Truth and Objectivity: http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/09/facts-values-truth-objectivity_22.html

Fact is value, value fact.

Which goes to show (call it the Law of Yodaïsm) that any statement centering on just 2 nouns will tend to be funny, or deep (the quantum state is decided by the context).

I always thought I should read Sraffa; I’ll let that self-made obligatiob stand but count myself lucky never ever to have to talk to the prick.

(one proof point for the Law of Yodaïsm: the continueing vogue of haiku’s)

#29: I haven’t checked the IP addresses (and indeed don’t know how to and if Kieran is remotely sensible, don’t have the requisite editor privileges either), but the Phillip Hallam Baker who is chief scientist at VeriSign does comment here occasionally, and so it is quite possible that he is joking.

You can value a fact, but you can’t fact a value. And that’s a proposition.

So, what was so objectionable about my post that it was rejected?

Only a guess, but your pseudonym is (or was) notorious as a tax haven, and might therefore be a likely spam word – John Q

Ok, fair enough.