Value-Free Inquiry

The Origins of Value-Free Inquiry

The origins of value-free inquiry date roughly back to the scientific revolution of the 17th century. During that time period, a monumental shift took place in our understanding of human knowledge. Influenced by philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians, this shift represented a change in humans' understanding of the universe (and themselves in it) as a holistic entity to their understanding of the universe as a dual-istic relationship between mind and body, fact and value, subjective and objective.

Rene Descartes's famous dictum, “I think therefore I am,” represented his belief in the necessity for human knowledge to emanate from an essential foundation. There is the mind, and it is distinct from the body, from the external world, and from nature ruled by mechanical laws. Human knowledge, therefore, required bringing the beliefs of the mind into alignment with the world outside of itself. Likewise, Isaac Newton's metaphor of the universe as a giant clock depicted nature as objective and predictable. Hence, careful and methodical experimentation was requisite to unlocking its mysteries.

As the principal elaborator of empiricism, 17th-century British philosopher John Locke incorporated the concepts of mind/body dualism and reality as mind independent, thereby extending these concepts to an understanding of facts as distinct from human values. During the 19th century, French philosopher Auguste Comte contended that the distinction between facts and values (our subjective, values-imbued opinions) required methods of inquiry restricted to the physically observable. As the leading architect of positivism, Comte held that knowledge could be true only if it corresponded directly with a physically observable fact. Comte's younger contemporary and correspondent, British empiricist philosopher John Stuart Mill, argued that inductive logic leading to laws of causation is the proper starting place for justifiable knowledge. His development of experimental procedures as a means for eliminating false causes and deriving verifiable causal relationships further instantiated the fact-versus-value distinction. These concepts (e.g., mind/body, fact/value, objective reality as mind independent, correspondence theory of truth, laws of causation) and [Page 911]attendant experimental procedures were incorporated by early 20th-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who favored the scientific method as a superior approach for studying the social world. Social facts, he believed, should be treated as things, and inquiry in the social sciences should be a value-free process.

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