Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Knowledge: Unused and Misused
IV
As several papers in this. book argue, without conscious commitment
to value judgments we can hardly hope to gain a concept
of the true, Le., least coercive and least fr.agile, relationship between
man and his society. I should like to show that even our
"highly scientific" natural sciences cannot do without such value
judgments. (Michael Polanyi, in his Personal Knowledge: Towards
a Post-Critical Philosophy) published both in Britain and the
United States in 1958, presents the same argumentin detail.)
Let us examine the work of the chemist. He serves one of the
oldest true natural sciences. His knowledge caused some of the
most spectacular transformations. of our internal and external environments.Chemistry,
among other deeds, helped medical art
become, in part, scientific. Laymen and social scientists accept
chemistry as a true representative of the exact and nonsubjective
natural sciences where measurement rules and the subjectivity of
human sensory experience has been replaced by apparatuses recording
in figures and decimals.
Especially, the public may believe, chemistry without exception
is an exact science with demonstrable nonevaluative proof when
the judgment and findings of a chemist are introduced in court
and a man can be convicted on such evidence. This is a fairy tale.
Recently I refreshed my merp.ory of my own studies in that field
in a long talk with a young doctor of chemistry who works in a
state laboratory controlling foods and beverages. Quite a number
of his analyses, on the basis of which a manufacturer or innkeeper
may be sentenced to jail, depend on the simple fact that chemist
and judge agree on a single sensory perception which most people
would call a culture-bound value judgment. A stench is a loathsome
stench in certain cultures only. Yet, I was told, it may suffice
for conviction even if a sample of suspect fat eludes all other
methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis. However, even
though chemist and judge agree on a stench as the criterion of
unfitness for human consumption, the same intrinsic sensory ex-
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