Science as viewed by positivism, should not engage in any value judgments of it object of study. It is an objective activity void of any social or moral value. Its mission is to focus only on empirical facts, from which as the positivists believe, no values can be produced. Also, the search for objective truth works with the sole purpose of empirical verification, independently of morality and self-conscience. The genealogy of the above argument traces back to the English empiricism of Hume and to the facts/values distinction that he introduced to the debate on knowledge. The absolute division between facts and values had close affinity to the realist theorization of the external view ‘from the side of God’. The totality of the Greek and Western metaphysical tradition was founded on the firm belief that the mind mirrors an independent external world; as well as that knowledge claims (judgments) are grounded in the world and that the objectivity of judgments is understood from the prism of eternity. In the contemporary thought however, mind does not represent passively an independent, static and conceptually determined world; the function of mind is that of an active intervention, transforming this ‘world’ and by this action mind transforms also itself in a continuous inter-relation. The world ‘is’ inherently uncertain and undefined and allows for an unlimited number of definitions. Knowledge claims are weaved within the context of a ‘life-world’ of human subjects in a given historical period. So, knowledge claims have a historic and temporal character and in this way the conception of the world viewed under the prism of eternity, is challenged. The view of the absolute theorization of the world and the epistemological claim of universal truth is being further deconstructed by the developments in modern physics, which admits that any theory is perspective.
We see from this analysis that the traditional foundationalism and the reduction to concrete convictions have been seriously undermined. What is acknowledged is that the intentional activity of consciousness is uniform and socially and historically determined and so the ‘facts vs values’ distinction becomes a logical distinction rather than a generic or causal one. To put it another way, it is the analytic rather than the ontological character of this distinction that has any importance for us today. Essentially, it is the end of the metaphysical and idealist division between ‘Being’ and ethics in the sphere of ontology (in which, ‘Being’ was autonomous to the subject); the division is maintained however, as a methodological principle of philosophical and scientific thought.
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