come more and more opaque, by making it impossible to untangle
what is from what ought to be. The more one distinguishes between
facts and values, the more one ends up with thebad common world,the
one we might call, with Plato, akakosmos.The concept that aspires to
replace the notion of value must thus anticipate a control procedure,
in order to avoid the countless little incidents of cheating through
which, intentionally or not, the definition of what is possible is con-
fused with that of what is desirable. Let us not forget to add this fourth
requirement to our set of specifications.
By exploring in turn both sides of the border laid down by the ven-
erable opposition between facts and values, we are beginning to un-
derstand that the notion of fact does not describe the production of
knowledge (it neglects both the intermediate stages and the shaping of
theories) any better than the notion of value allows us to understand
morality (it takes up its functions after the facts have been defined and
finds itself with no recourse except the appeal to principles that are as
impotent as they are universal). Must we retain this dichotomy in
spite of its disadvantages, or must we abandon it in spite of the danger
that comes from depriving oneself of the advantages of good sense? In
order to make an enlightened decision, it is important to have a grasp
of the seemingly inexhaustible usefulness of the distinction between
facts and values.
This distinction still has its greatest power and appears most virtu-
ous in the form of a split between ideology and Science. In fact, those
who follow the traces of the ideological influences that tarnish the fac-
tualness of the disciplines of biology, economy, history, and even phys-
ics, are major users of the fact-value distinction, since they need it
to prevent the little incidents of cheating noted above, by which an
axiological preference is harbored on the sly. If we were to show, for
example, that immunology is entirely polluted by war metaphors, that
neurobiology consumes principles of business organization in enor-
mous quantities, that genetics conceives of planning in a determinist
fashion that no architect would use to speak of his plans, we would be
denouncing a number of frauds used by smugglers to conceal debat-
able values under the umbrella of matters of fact.^7 Conversely, if we
were to denounce the use a political party makes of population genet-
ics, or the use novelists make of fractals and chaos, or the use philoso-
phers make of the quantum uncertainty principle, or the use industri-
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