ABSTRACT
Today I wish to speak about a question which has been a focus for my philosophical interests for the past twenty years: the existence of and the importance of knowledge outside of the exact sciences, ‘nonscientific’ knowledge, and, in particular the existence and importance of knowledge of values in the widest sense (what is it to know that something is better or worse than something else: a better way of life, or a better course of action, or a better theory (in science), or a better interpretation (of a text, etc.). This focus has naturally led me to point out how ‘paradigmatic’ science (physics) itself depends on judgments which are ‘nonscientific’. It has also led me into the controversial question of how it is possible for value claims to be objective, and it has led me to a close reading of the American pragmatists, who were my predecessors in the study of all of these problems. What I would like to do today is to give an account of the general conclusions to which I have come, and to do so in as nontechnical a way as possible. This is not something that philosophers do very often nowadays; usually we read a paper to one another on some fairly well defined topic. But if philosophy is to retain its connection to the wide human concerns which have always been its reason for existence, from time to time a philosopher must speak not as a channel for a particular argument or thesis but as an individual who embodies a point of view – a point of view whose formulation is necessarily idiosyncratic, but which, the philosopher hopes, embodies insights that are something more than idiosyncratic at the end. For this reason, I shall allow myself not only to sketch a point of view rather than argue for it in detail, but I shall allow myself to explain why I hold it by describing the particular way in which it developed in the course of my writing and teaching.
