Abstract

This study examines the Werturteilsstreit, an ongoing controversy about the relationship between empirical social research and judgements regarding the desirability or undesirability of social phenomena. Central to the study is the work of Max Weber, which remains the principal stimulus and recurring focal point of the controversy. Focusing on a crucial ambiguity in the contested idea of scientific "value-freedom," I first argue that the dispute about value-judgements is in fact most clearly treated as two closely related but distinct disputes--a "methodological" dispute concerning the influence of shifting cultural-historical values on the social sciences, and a "metanormative" dispute concerning whether and how social scientific knowledge can validate moral and political claims. By exploiting the generally unnoticed complexity of Weber's pivotal contribution to these controversies, I then proceed to develop an "intermediary" position which problematizes the standard battlelines between proponents of "value-free" and "normative" social science. ;Turning first to the methodological dispute, I argue that one can reject the broadly "positivist" conception of value-freedom, which attempts to exclude extra-scientific value assumptions from the contexts of empirical analysis and validation, and that one can do so without endangering the idea of scientific objectivity. My argument here relies heavily on Weber's Wertbeziehung thesis, which I read in concert with developments in "postempiricist" philosophy of science, and as providing the basis for a transcendental criticism of methodological value-freedom. In part II of the study, I then argue that this criticism does not entail a refutation of the more properly Weberian conception of Wertfreiheit as a metanormative principal--i.e., as a constraint upon scientifically informed social criticism. The primary interlocutor with the Weberian position here is the critical theory and discourse ethics of Jurgen Habermas. Contrary to prevailing views, I argue that Weber's "decisionist" model of practical deliberation need not be interpreted as a form of blatant ethical non-cognitivism; and that Habermas's arguments for a critical social science do not suffice to dispense with the "immanent" considerations that constitute the basis of the Weberian critical model.