Felix Oppenheim, Ernest Nagel, Anna Alexandrova, and Leo Strauss, part 3.
In the “post-script” to a (2001) festschrift, Freedom, Power and Political Morality, devoted to him, Felix Oppenheim (1913-2011) rhetorically asks if he is the “lone survivor of a movement by now of merely historical interest?” and distances himself from the suggestion that he was a logical positivist because he rejects “operationalism and radical empiricism.” (p. 218) Rather, he prefers to understand himself as committed to conceptual reconstruction, which provides concepts “with descriptive definitions in order to make them available for fruitful communication even among persons or groups with different normative views.” (p. 218)
Conceptual reconstruction is, thus, a species of conceptual engineering or conceptual articulation and has two goals: first, it is in the service of fruitful communication in the context of substantive normative and political pluralism. (As such, the project is not far removed from the spirit of the Rawlsian enterprise of conceptually constituting an overlapping consensus.) Of course, one may do conceptual reconstruction in a non-pluralist society, but there it would be less/not needed.
What is distinctive about Oppenheim’s program is that he thinks that a ‘descriptive’ definition does “without the use of valuational notions.” (p. 219) And this also makes clear that facilitating fruitful communication is not the only possible use of conceptual reconstruction: second, Oppenheim also intends to provide social scientists — he explicitly mentions political scientists (p. 221) — with concepts that can be used in their descriptive or empirical social science. The absence of valuational notions facilitates in the aim of avoiding the imposition of normative views on the social phenomena studied.*
Assuming that such conceptual reconstruction without valuational notions is possible, this entails that often Oppenheim offers explicative definition “which might diverge from ordinary language.” (219) To what degree such divergence makes the output of concept reconstruction less amenable to political life is ignored, but it seems safe to predict that conceptual reconstruction is more useful to those committed to value-free social science than to political agents in the middle of public contestation. Descriptive definitions so conceived “are not true or false, since they are linguistic stipulations.” (219) They are, rather, more or less useful. And this consequentialist understanding of success has a Carnapian flavor to it.
It is to be allowed, however, that in the context of mutual trust or elite bargaining, “political actors sometimes make some effort at ‘resolving those differences through argument and persuasion’” and then the presence of descriptively defined concepts may be very useful. (p. 221; Oppenheim is partially quoting Ball’s contribution to the festschrift.) I have in mind the role, say, of the budget projections of the Dutch planning agency (CPB) in Dutch political debates. So, Oppenheim’s program can work in a political culture in which technocratic tools (say a lexicon) are welcomed to reduce social friction or are used to reduce conflict over the terms of a bargain.
What this requires is “a lexicon be uncontestable, in the sense that its vocabulary be made up of definitions that are not valuationally tinted.” (221) Such a lexicon can be contested and contestable in the sense that an improved vocabulary might facilitate more efficient or consensual (etc.) bargaining. No lexicon is final.
Oppenheim allows that his conception of descriptive definition is dependent on an “idea” he “did take over from the logical positivists: the separability of ‘facts’ and ‘values’ on the conceptual level.” (219, emphasis in original) In context, he does not argue for the claim.
Oppenheim had defended the claim in a 1973 paper, "“Facts” and “Values” in Politics: Are They Separable?." Political Theory 1.1: 54-68. There he acknowledges that in the speech acts of ordinary or everyday life there is no such separability. (58) So, there is another sense in which Oppenheim echoes (Carnap’s) logical positivism: it relies on a relatively sharp distinction between a natural language of ordinary folk and a specialist language (which is often formal). And in the 1973 paper, it’s explicit that Oppenheim is more focused on designing a “the language of social and political inquiry.” (59)
Unfortunately, the 1973 paper argues by way of criticizing those who had either de facto or in practice denied such separability. So it is not really helpful in reconstructing Oppenheim’s positive argument in favor of the conceptual separability of facts and values thesis. However, it does point to a very important entailment of his position: “Definitions of value words in descriptive terms cannot be part of an effective language of political inquiry, no more so than explications of factual concepts with the help of value words.” (62) So, conceptual reconstruction cannot eliminate values from terms or notions that are intrinsically evaluative.
At this point, I realized that I probably needed to look at some of Oppenheim’s descriptive definitions in order to see if these provided further evidence for his views on the separability of facts and values. I looked at his list of references (in the 1973) article, and went to his (1970) piece on “Egalitarianism as a Descriptive Concept.” And there I caught a lucky break. He writes:
This terminology is indebted to Ernest Nagel’s (1961) The Structure of Science, which is cited in the accompanying footnote. In the very pages cited, Nagel had distinguished between two senses in which a value judgment may be used: first, “the sense in which a value judgment expresses approval or disapproval either of some moral (or social) ideal, or of some action (or institution) because of a commitment to such an ideal; and [second] the sense in which a value judgment expresses an estimate of the degree to which some commonly recognized (and more or less clearly defined) type of action, object, or institution is embodied in a given instance.” (492).
What makes this notable are three facts. First, Anna Alexandrova (BJPS, 2018) has given pointed reasons for denying the robustness of Nagel’s distinction. Second, as I and Alexandrova have noted, Nagel himself is explicitly responding to Leo Strauss’ arguments (recall here; here).
Third, recently a transcription was published of Strauss’ lecture course, “Introduction to Political Philosophy,” in 1965 at The University of Chicago. Strauss had assigned Nagel’s Structure in the course, and he prepared a response to some of Nagel’s criticism. In particular, while relying on Nagel’s admission that characterizing value judgments cannot be eliminated from the social (and bio-medical) sciences, Strauss went on to suggest (and here he partially anticipates Alexandrova) with the illustration of some examples that it is by no means obvious that characterizing value judgments can be really merely descriptive (pp. 105ff).[1] This is especially so for teleological entities (tools) and organisms that are the product of natural selection. That Nagel himself worried about the status of such examples can be inferred from the fact that how to characterize function statements remained an open problem for him throughout his subsequent career.
The existence and nature of this (1965) material suggests that Strauss also made an explicit decision not to engage directly publicly (anymore) with some of his analytic critics. As regular readers recall (here; and here), Oppenheim had also been one of his critics (although then not on the fact-value distinction as such).
I have not checked whether Oppenheim relies on Nagel’s distinction to justify all of his descriptive definitions. So, perhaps, he offers a distinct argument for the conceptual separability thesis elsewhere that is not vulnerable to the Strauss/Alexandrova critique. But this episode may be a rare instance where the historian of philosophy can point to an instance where more intellectual polemics between antagonists who were known to each other might have been fruitful.
[1] Strauss, Leo. Leo Strauss on political philosophy: responding to the challenge of positivism and historicism. Edited by Catherine Zuckert, University of Chicago Press, 2018, Chapter 5. The discussion is wide-ranging. (Strauss treats Nagel as a kind of ‘positivist’ who he compares to Reichenbach (p. 110).)
*See also Karl W. Deutsch and Leroy N. Rieselbach (1965) “Recent Trends in Political Theory and Political Philosophy” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Jul., 1Vol. 360, Latin America Tomorrow (Jul., 1965), pp. 153-154, where Oppenheim is mentioned. (Recall this post.)