PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 15 



Every value judgment is, in the last analysis, also a judg- 

 ment of fact, viz., the fact that someone has taken a value 

 attitude toward an object. Furthermore, from the other 

 side, every judgment of fact is probably, in some direct or 

 indirect way, the expression of a value attitude. Facts are 

 attended to through acts of selection which may express 

 unconscious interests and unrecognized desires. Even the 

 scientist must guard against the tendency to blind himself 

 to the existence of data which would constitute a refutation 

 of a pet theory. The very fact that the scientist prefers true 

 judgments to false is the result of a preferential state. Hence 

 the distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of 

 value, which has a certain practical working effectiveness, 

 becomes relatively unsatisfactory as a foundation for the 

 distinction between science and philosophy. 



QUANTITY VS. QUALITY 



A fourth view of the interrelation of the two fields is that 

 which apportions all discussions of the quantitative aspects 

 of experience to science and all considerations of the qualita- 

 tive aspects to philosophy. The following quotation from 

 Eddington is a classic as a description of the task of the 

 scientist. 'Let us examine the kind of knowledge which is 

 handled by exact science. If we search the examination 

 papers in physics and natural philosophy for the more intel- 

 ligible questions we may come across one beginning some- 

 thing like this: 'An elephant slides down a grassy hill- 

 side . . .' The experienced candidate knows that he need 

 not pay much attention to this; it is only put in to give an 

 impression of realism. He reads on: 'The mass of the ele- 

 phant is two tons.' Now we are getting down to business; 

 the elephant fades out of the picture and a mass of two tons 

 takes its place. What exactly is this two tons, the real 

 subject matter of the problem? It refers to some property 

 or condition which we vaguely describe as 'ponderosity' 

 occurring in a particular region of the external world. But 

 we shall not get much further that way; the nature of the 



A 



