From Explanation to Criticism: A Critical Examination of James Bohman’s and Charles Taylor’s Views on Science and Values in Social Sciences

One of the legacies of logical positivists is the value-free ideal of science that implies, inter alia, that facts and values are dichotomous; the fact-value dichotomy thesis. Both of the doctrines have been criticized by philosophers and sociologists of science during the last decades, and many case studies have been carried out to undermine them. There have been serious objections raised against the doctrines in social sciences. Some of the objections have been posed by James Bohman and Charles Taylor. Bohman believes that all theories in social sciences have critical aspects as well as explanatory ones, and so, they are evaluative as well as descriptive. Taylor, too, believes that any theory in political science has two inter-related parts: an explanatory framework and a set of some value positions. In this paper, by criticizing Bohman’s and Taylor’s arguments, I aim to show that criticism may not be a part of science qua science. I also suggest that those values that are considered to be the critical part of a social scientific theory may be regarded as its technological products.