Performative character of values in social sciences: second part

Abstract

The path traveled so far has been to provide a tight and updated formulation of the renowned “axiological neutrality” principle in science and to examine a limited inventory of criticisms that allows us to clear the road in order to approach a relatively detailed analysis of the various idiosyncratic peculiarities that these discussions adopt within the social sciences. In any case, and with regard to this first part, our purpose has not been to show that all scientific theory is “value-laden” in the same way and with the same incidence. But in this second part, we do intend to show that in social theorizations, social and moral values
are not only, in general, indistinguishable from epistemic values, but they normatively conform their object and dispose the subject to relate under a certain modality with that object; in other words, it “constructs” its object and the subject’s respective positions in terms of approval, rejection, or other intermediate valuations.