ABSTRACT
Media and communications scholarship face a plethora of normative issues, but systematic normative analysis in social research often falls short. While it is now the anodyne view that the study of social phenomena is inextricably normative, much of the social sciences are ensconced in a fact/value dichotomy and the attendant idea that normative questions are matters of subjective value, and therefore impossible to answer correctly. In response, realists attempt to institute a clean break between facts and values, while constructivists collapse the distinction altogether, yet neither approach is satisfying. This book provides a framework for analyzing the relationship between empirical and normative ideas, and contends that normative questions are not impossible, but that they have objectively better and worse answers. Engaging in normative analysis to clarify our normative presuppositions is an important, but under-appreciated task that will only make social research better, more robust, and more objective.
