Science, self-correction and values

from Peirce to institutionalism

Malcolm Rutherford

pp. 391-406

in: Mark A. Lutz (ed), Social economics, Berlin, Springer, 1990

Abstract

The lengthy passages quoted above perfectly display the major characteristics of what might be called the 'standard" institutionalist treatment of processes of valuation.¹ The first and most obvious characteristic is the naturalism of the approach. Values are seen as being determined, appraised, reappraised, and modified in a continual process of instrumental and experimental investigation no different from the process of inquiry found within natural science. This follows Dewey's explicit denial that "as judgments, or in respect to method of inquiry, test, and verification, value-judgments have any peculiar or unique features' (Dewey, 1946, pp. 258–259; see also Dewey, 1939). Furthermore, the application of scientific methods is also taken to be relevant to the formation of social values. Here, again following Dewey, there is an explicit identification of a democratic community with a 'scientific" community of inquiry (Gouinlock, 1972, p. 354). A second feature, as the passages from Ayres make abundantly clear, is the associated claim that the application of scientific methods to the democratic discourse over values aids powerfully in the settlement of belief and the creation of a broad consensus on social values and appropriate social policy. The third and last characteristic is the view of the scientific method as, in some largely undefined sense, self-corrective.

Cited authors

Dewey John

Peirce Charles Sanders