![]() ![]() Furthermore, from the perspective of religions that believe in a personal God, God's very purpose for creating the cosmos is rooted in values: love and goodness and creativity rooted in the emotional core of His heart. Thus, any distinction between facts and value is secondary, for on the ontological level they are inseparable. ![]() The facticity of phenomena, however, is always surrounded by the ultimate question of the meaning of being. Much of the effort to establish the distinction between fact and value was for the purpose of arriving at a value-free, objective description of facts-on the positivistic premise that only facts are relevant in the search for truth, not values. If scientific language is not purely descriptive, then any sharp contrast between factual and evaluative language will be misconceived. Secondly, some have argued that science is itself an evaluative enterprise. A realist may argue that the sentence “freedom is good” aims to state a fact, and, moreover, succeeds in doing so. Firstly, moral realists argue that evaluative language is fact stating. The fact-value distinction is much contested and resistance comes from opposite directions. The emotive and imperatival functions of evaluative language are, crucially, not attempts to state facts. Saying that “kindness is good” is a way of telling people that they should be kind. Similarly, prescriptivists argue that evaluative language aims to get people to make certain choices. More particularly, emotivists argue that evaluations serve to express the speaker’s feelings and attitudes: saying that “kindness is good” is a way of expressing one’s approval of kindness. Evaluative judgments are said to fulfill special non-descriptive roles, that is, do something other than state facts. On this view, although the sentences “Roses are red” (descriptive) and “kindness is good” (evaluative) have a similar grammatical form, their linguistic functions are markedly different. For example, freedom is one of the central values of modernity and to the extent that people believe that freedom is good, they value freedom.Ī great deal of twentieth century moral theory sustained a sharp divide between facts and values-the fact-value distinction. A value is something good, or something one believes to be good. For example, it is a fact that Mount Everest is taller than Mount Kilimanjaro. If the substance dualist’s meaning remains obscure, that is because it can mean several different things to say that selves are not bodies.A fact is an actual state of the world. Maybe this is because one no longer recognizes ‘minds’ as entities in their own right, or ‘substances.’ However, selves - the things we refer to by use of ‘I’ - are surely substances, and it does little violence to the intention behind mind/body dualism to interpret it as a dualism of bodies and selves. So if someone claims to find a difference between minds and bodies per se, it is not initially clear what he is maintaining. ![]() ![]() Substance dualism, once a main preoccupation of Western metaphysics, has fallen strangely out of view today’s mental/physical dualisms are dualisms of fact, property, or event. ….it wholly irrational to regard as doubtful matters that are perceived clearly and distinctly by the understanding in its purity, on account of mere prejudices of the senses and hypotheses in which there is an element of the unknown.ĭescartes, Geometrical Exposition of the Meditations ![]()
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