Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

60 Scientism and Values
relations .are too obvious to need going into them. Again, we may
be able to discover a man's or a group's values by means of psychological
tests. But aside from the fact that the reliability of these
tests is at the moment a controversial matter (for in principle they
need not be unreliable), their radical defect, from the standpoint
of our discussion, is that they cannot dispense with the definition
of the value and its observation and its relation to behavioral
traits expressed in the answers to the tests. We cannot judge the
presence of a value without apprehending it to be present, and
we cannot apprehend it except through the act of intuition
through which it makes itself present to us as an intelligible object.
From the standpoint of the kind of objectivity which is represented
by the judgments that make up the sciences, the study of
value is, so to speak, born with an original sin that no methodological
baptism seems to be able to absolve it from. Let me add,
however, although only in passing, that this does not make value
judgments hopelessly subjective, mere expressions of affective responses
which in principle are beyond rational suasion. They can
achieve, and often do, a remarkable degree of objectivity. But
what kind of objectivity is achieved and what degree and by what
means are not questions that I can address myself to in this paper.
This does not exhaust our difficulty. The preceding remarks
refer to the difference between the objects of science and the objects
with which the student of man is concerned. But there is
another difference, and that is located in the nature of the observers.
This difference is pointed out by Robert Redfield in the paper
referred to above. I shall let Redfield speak for himself: The difference
between what I call a scientist and a student of man, lies,
for one thing, in the fact that the latter observes values, and he
... enters imaginatively into the minds of the value·-carrying human
beings he studies. To understand another's value, I exercise my own
valuing nature. Moreover, I come to see that this valuing of mine, as
I work, is a part of my problem of observation and analysis. It has to
be thought about and controlled. The social scientist no longer sees
himself as a special kind of machine studying other things conceived
as machines, but as· a human being bringing to his study value judg-