“A History of Metaethics and Values in Science.”

I pursue Matt Brown’s (2020) and James Leach’s (1968a) historical suggestions that there is a relationship between metaethical noncognitivism and certain arguments for the value neutrality of the sciences. In particular, I relate C.L. Stevenson’s emotivism to arguments by Herbert Feigl, Carl Hempel, and Ernest Nagel for the sciences’ value neutrality. I also consider whether these arguments can be disentangled from their controversial metaethical claims by looking at Robert Alexander’s (1974) account of value neutrality based on the view that a scientist’s aims are discharged by making empirical statements. Drawing upon Leach’s (1968a; 1969b) defense of the argument from inductive risk, I argue Alexander fails to offer a metaethically neutral version of the value neutrality of the sciences. Though I do not explicitly explore this, I think the history I sketch is relevant to recent calls for philosophers of science to more fully characterize the ‘values’ in ‘values and science.’