What’s the difference between a fact and a value judgement? The answer, of course, is ‘Miaow’ – at least, if you ask my neighbor’s cat.
Suppose the cat to be speaking for Hume or Kant or Moore or some other such non-tabby. Let M be the set of all instantiations of Miaow meanings re. fact value hiatus as cognized and received in a given decision context by Roberto Unger. The question arises, is there any fact, in that decision context, which, with some Bayesian probability, is also a value judgement? Suppose there is only one possible way the world can be such that a given fact is true iff a semantically identical deontic proposition is implemented. Here, the value judgement is the condition for the fact. Relaxing the assumption of only one possible world, we can get a Bayesian debate re. the probability that a value is a fact, based on the available M which is uniquely resolved for every Unger.
In this sense, Unger’s M, for some given decision situation, includes the null element. Is it possible to classify all value judgments according to how close they come to the nearest possible fact? If so, M is well ordered provided values are. This suggests a relationship to stochastic dominance in inference based decision theory such that for some given ‘value-aversion’ or ‘fact-aversion’, we can devise a heuristic which has the effect of turning any value judgement into a factual statement with an ‘error term’ related to distance from the null element. In other words, if one fact is a value judgement and it is possible to rank value judgements according to how different they are from the ‘closest possible’ fact, then all value judgements are facts with a bigger or smaller error term and are, for any given degree of value aversion or adhesion, more or less stochastically dominated.
Another approach, which might converge on the above, is to think of Putnam fact/value entanglement as legitimating mixed strategy choice. In this case considerations of Evolutionary stability yield a ranking over M.
By contrast, I can believe I have low cognitive power in this world but ‘infinite personality’ across possible and impossible worlds- but this cashes out as not feeling at home in this world- that’s ontological dysphoria- which Unger thinks is real, real bad and evil and will probably cause hair to grow on my palms and lead to blindness.
2) some sort of ‘real’ Time which evolves and so isn’t really many fingered and has no truck with that Possible Worlds bullshit- i.e. this is a brutalist ‘anything goes’ Presentism, wholly at odds with the fin de siecle, fin du globe, Proustian pathos of Bergsonian duration and which, as such, only attracts Tim Maudlin or Lee Smolin type Soft Left senile delinquents.
Essentially, in Unger’s conception of Time, nothing inter-personal is conserved, Noether’s theorem gains no purchase, so we know the system is dissipative- it throws away information. But, that’s the same thing as erasing the fact/value distinction. But in that case Smolin, Woits et al needn’t actually do any Physics to say String theory is not even wrong because human beings have no right way to agree something is wrong. Thus the only game in town is declaring a theory to be ontologically dysphoric because it isn’t dedicated to ‘making itself at home in the World’- itself constrained to be Unger’s moral gymnasium.
But only for Unger who, having successfully erased the fact/ value distinction, felt able to become the Minister for Strategic Corruption under Lula in Brazil and to hand out Govt. money to various random shitheads- not because it was fun or the optimal mixed strategy but because it was like EMPOWERING DEMOCRACY and finding a THIRD WAY and other such shite.
The moral of this story is- don’t waste your money on books by Harvard Professors who erase the fact value distinction. Cut out the middle-man! Just listen to your neighbor’s cat. If only in this sense, it really is talking to you.