factual content See ANALYTIC – SYNTHETIC DISTINC -. TIO. fact–value distinction, the apparently fundamental difference between how things are and how they should be. That people obey the law (or act honestly or desire money) is one thing; that they should is quite another. The first is a matter of fact, the second a matter of value.
Hume is usually credited with drawing the distinction when he noticed that one cannot uncontroversially infer an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ (the is–ought gap). From the fact, say, that an action would maximize overall happiness, we cannot legitimately infer that it ought to be done – without the introduction of some (so far suppressed) evaluative premise. We could secure the inference by assuming that one ought always to do what maximizes overall happiness. But that assumption is evidently evaluative. And any other premise that might link the non-evaluative premises to an evaluative conclusion would look equally evaluative. No matter how detailed and extensive the non-evaluative premises, it seems no evaluative conclusion follows (directly and as a matter of logic). Some have replied that at least a few non-evaluative claims do entail evaluative ones. To take one popular example, from the fact that some promise was made, we might (it appears) legitimately infer that it ought to be kept, other things equal – and this without the introduction of an evaluative premise. Yet many argue that the inference fails, or that the premise is actually evaluative, or that the conclusion is not. Hume himself was both bold and brief about the gap’s significance, claiming simply that paying attention to it ‘wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason’ (Treatise of Human Nature). Others have been more expansive. Moore, for instance, in effect relied upon the gap to establish (via the open question argument) that any attempt to define evaluative terms using non-evaluative ones would commit the naturalistic fallacy. Moore’s main target was the suggestion that ‘good’ means ‘pleasant’ and the fallacy, in this context, is supposed to be misidentifying an evaluative property, being good, with a natural property, being pleasant. Assuming that evaluative terms have meaning, Moore held that some could be defined using others (he thought, e.g., that ‘right’ could be defined as ‘productive of the greatest possible good’) and that the rest, though meaningful, must be indefinable terms denoting simple, non-natural, properties. Accepting Moore’s use of the open question argument but rejecting both his non-naturalism and his assumption that evaluative terms must have (descriptive) meaning, emotivists and prescriptivists (e.g. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and Hare) argued that evaluative terms have a role in language other than to denote properties. According to them, the primary role of evaluative language is not to describe, but to prescribe. The logical gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, they argue, establishes both the difference between fact and value and the difference between describing (how things are) and recommending (how they might be). Some naturalists, though, acknowledge the gap and yet maintain that the evaluative claims nonetheless do refer to natural properties. In the process they deny the ontological force of the open question argument and treat evaluative claims as describing a special class of facts.
See also ETHICS, MOORE, MORAL REALIS.
G.S.-M. faculty psychology, the view that the mind is a collection of departments responsible for distinct psychological functions. Related to faculty psychology is the doctrine of localization of function, wherein each faculty has a specific brain location. Faculty psychologies oppose theories of mind as a unity with one function (e.g., those of Descartes and associationism) or as a unity with various capabilities (e.g., that of Ockham), and oppose the related holistic distributionist or mass-action theory of the brain. Faculty psychology began with Aristotle, who divided the human soul into five special senses, three inner senses (common sense, imagination, memory) and active and passive mind. In the Middle Ages (e.g., Aquinas) Aristotle’s three inner senses were subdivied, creating more elaborate lists of five to seven inward wits. Islamic physicianphilosophers such as Avicenna integrated Aristotelian faculty psychology with Galenic medicine by proposing brain locations for the faculties.
Two important developments in faculty psychology occurred during the eighteenth century. First, Scottish philosophers led by Reid developed a version of faculty psychology opposed to the empiricist and associationist psychologies of Locke and Hume. The Scots proposed that humans were endowed by God with a set of faculties permitting knowledge of the world and morality. The Scottish system exerted considerable influence in the United States, where it was widely taught as a moral, character-building discipline, and in the nineteenth century this ‘Old Psychology’ opposed the experimental ‘New Psychology.’ Second, despite then being called a charlatan, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) laid the foundation for modern neuropsychology in his work on localization of function. Gall rejected existing faculty psychologies as philosophical, unbiological, and incapable of accounting for everyday behavior. Gall proposed an innovative behavioral and biological list of faculties and brain localizations based on comparative anatomy, behavior study, and measurements of the human skull. Today, faculty psychology survives in trait and instinct theories of personality, Fodor’s theory that mental functions are implemented by neurologically ‘encapsulated’ organs, and localizationist theories of the brain. See also ARISTOTLE , PHILOSOPHY OF MIND , PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOG. T.H.L.