Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

90 Scientism and Values
attitude and action, and that he cannot divorce the meaning of
the incidents from the structure of the plot. The plot is based on
a position which takes facts out of empirical conjunction and
places them in logical or dialectical constructions.
He is therefore not dealing in positive words that have a single
fixed meaning when he uses terms that depend on a context for
their signification. Another way of expressing this is to say that
the terms in his vocabulary are polar, in that their meaning
changes according to what they are matched with. And since the
sociologist has the opportunity to match them with almost anything,
he is not dealing with scientific invariables when he talks
about "the underprivileged" or "a social problem." He is being
an ethical philosopher from the beginning, with the responsibility
which that implies.
The conclusion comes down to this: Things which are discriminated
empirically cannot thereafter by the same operation be
discriminated dialectically. If one wishes to arrive at a dialectical
discrimination, one has to start from a position which makes that
possible.
4. Other Forms of ((Identification"
This ignoring of the nature of dialectical inquiry is the most
serious perversion committed by the scientistic sociologists in seeking
to maintain their identification, but there are other, perhaps
more superficial, procedures, whose general end is the same kind
of simulation. One of the more noticeable is what might be called
pedantic analysis. The scientistic sociologist wishes people to feel
that he is just as empirical and thoroughgoing as the natural
scientist and that his conclusions are based just as relentlessly on
observed data. The desire to present this kind of fa\ade accounts,
one may suspect, for the many examples and the extensive use of
statistical tables found in the works of some of them. It has
been said of certain novelists that they create settings having such
a wealth of realistic detail that the reader assumes that the plot
which is to follow will be equally realistic, when this may be far
from the case. What happens is that the novelist disarms the