ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an objection that the historicist philosopher of science, Harold Brown, has raised against the very idea of a "cognitive psychology of science," as the objection is indicative of the conceptual obstacle that needs to be overcome. Since philosophers have traditionally been allowed to speculate from within a socially frictionless medium, they have tended to run together the ends of knowledge with the most explicit and direct means of achieving those ends. The chapter discusses the nuances of the Neo-Kantian debate over concept formation in the social sciences in order to provide a vantage point from which to reconstruct philosophy of science debates over the compatibility of the natural and the normative. In the Weberian lingo, the "value-neutrality" of economic knowledge to policy is a direct consequence of the "value relevance" that informs the gathering of economic knowledge.
