Grue-Sørensen imellem filosofi og pædagogik

The philosophical situation at Copenhagen University in the 1960’s was dominated by two positivists. Th elogical positivist Jørgen Jørgensen – who had written the history of the “movement” – and the legal positivistAlf Ross. There were also two “outsiders”: Peter Zinkernagel, who did more analytical philosophy of language in the British style, and K. Grue Sørensen who was working in the traditions of neo-Kantianism. In 1955 Grue-Sørensen was hired as the first professor in education – after a long controversy about the scientific status ofeducation as a discipline – but with a focus on the history of education. He had received a doctoral degree in philosophy in 1950 with a dissertation on refl exivity as a philosophical concept and a thesis about the reflexivity of consciousness. He was also an objectivist in ethics, and had been critical of the prevalent moral relativism and subjectivism found in recent philosophy. Jørgensen and Ross had done important work on moral argumentation with more technical work on the logic of imperatives and norms. Moral objectivism was not only wrong but in a way also “immoral” because it undermined their belief in democracy. Especially Jørgensen also thought that the idea of reflexivity was wrong when applied to consciousness. Neither statements nor consciousness could be reflexive – that is refer to themselves/itself. The reflexivity of consciousness is – according to Jørgensen – simply not an empirical psychological fact. Grue-Sørensen tried to establish the foundation of a theory of education based both on conceptions of consciousness and of the relation between scientific knowledge – facts – and moral values – in a neo-Kantian fashion. For him the interplay between ethics and knowledge was a central part of a theory of education – a belief due to which he never became a professor of philosophy – having tried many times. These debates in philosophy and in education were superseded in the 1970’s by the rise in influence of the German inspiration from Critical Theory and the demise of logical positivism.

Imperative logic

Imperatives lie at the heart of both practical and moral reasoning, yet they have been overshadowed by propositions and relegated by many philosophers to the status of exclamations. One reason for this is that a sentence’s having literal meaning seems to require its having truth-conditions and ‘Keep your promises!’ appears to lack such conditions, just as ‘Ouch!’ does. One reductionist attempt to develop a logic of imperatives translates them into declaratives and construes inferential relations among the former in terms of inferential relations among the latter. Since no such reduction seems fully to capture the meaning of imperatives, others have expanded our notion of inference to include not just truth – but also satisfaction – preservation, according to which an imperative is satisfied just in case what it enjoins is brought about. A logic capturing what is distinctive about imperatives may shed light on the question whether an ‘ought’ is derivable from an ‘is’; and may elucidate the claim that morality is, or comprises, a system of hypothetical imperatives. Furthermore, instructions, which are often formulated as imperatives (‘Take two tablets on an empty stomach!’), are crucial to the construction of plans of action. A proper understanding of imperatives and their inferential properties may thus also illuminate practical reasoning.

Ruth Anna Putnam and the Fact-Value Distinction

This article is a defence of the Fact-Value distinction against considerations brought up by Ruth Anna Putnam in three articles in Philosophy, especially her ‘Perceiving Facts and Values’ January 1998. I defend metaphysical realism about facts and anti-realism about values against Putnam' intermediate position about both and I relate the matter to the logic of imperatives. The motivations of scientists or historians to select fields of investigation are irrelevant to the objectivity of their hypotheses, and so is the goodness or badness of the social consequences of their work though these may affect their motivations.