Moral Description: Overcoming the Fact-Value Dichotomy in Social Research

Abstract

Values in social research are a vexed question. However, they cannot and should not be avoided. This article argues against the familiar fact-value dichotomy and presents a cognitive approach to values based inter alia on the views of the philosophers Julius Kovesi (1967) and Hilary Putnam (1990, 2002) and the economist philosopher Amartya Sen (1982, 1987). The article concludes that rejecting the fact-value dichotomy does not mean that "anything goes." On the contrary, it proposes reuniting facts and values in a common, factually-grounded and rational cognitive enterprise.