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Appendix 2. Note on Facts and Valuations 1057
all possibility of modification by any contingency or directed effort whatsoever. What
is tp be criticized is the use of terms to hide the fact that there is a value premise in a
value judgment. The observation of the facts of a given existing situation alone will
never permit the conclusion that such a situation is good or desirable or even that this
situation is inevitable in the future. In other words, we are making a plea for explicit
value premises. We are also making a plea for unbiased research. The relation between
these two desiderata is this, that it is the hidden valuations which give entrance to biases
in social science.
The author is well aware that some of his criticisms and suggestions in the preceding
pages on the history and logic of the hidden valuations in social science are controversial
and would ask the reader to note that the following remarks on a positive methodology
for social science as well as Sections I and 2 of this Appendix do not depend on the
correctness of Section 3.
It should also be reiterated as a concluding remark that when we have illustrated our
thesis by citing prominent American sociologists, this is only because American sociology
has provided the main scientific frame for the scientific study of the Negro problem
which is our particular concern in this book. The tendencies criticized are, however,
common in all social sciences in the entire Western world. Too, not all American
sociologists have a do-nothing (laissez-faire) bias. In earlier generations Lester F. Ward,
Simon Patten, and many others were reformers, and Ward thought of social science as
social engineering. Their methodological principles were not clear, however. In the
present generation Louis Wirth, to mention only one prominent representative of a
growing group holding a dissenting view, has expressed opinions in fundamental agree-
ment with this appendix.®
4. The Points of View Adopted in This Book
Scientific facts do not exist fer se, waiting for scientists to discover them. A scientific
fact is a construction abstracted out of a complex and interwoven reality by means of
arbitrary definitions and classifications. The processes of selecting a problem and a basic
hypothesis, of limiting the scope of study, and of defining and classifying data relevant
to such a setting of the problem, involve a choice on the part of the investigator. The
choice is made from an indefinite number of possibilities. The same is true when draw-
ing inferences from organized data. Everything in the world is connected with every-
thing else; when shall one stop, and in what direction shall one proceed when establish-
ing causal relations.^ Scientific conventions usually give guidance. But, first, convention
itself is a valuation, usually a biased one, and it is the more dangerous as it is usually
hidden in tacit preconceptions which are not discussed or even known; second, progress
in science is made by those who are most capable of freeing themselves from the con-
ventions in their science and of seeking guidance from other sciences and nonscientific
endeavors.
* Louis Wirth, “Preface” in Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia Ci93^)> PP* xiii-xxxi
and his article “Ideological Aspects of Social Disorganization,” American Sociological
Review (August, 1940), pp. 472-4S2. John Dollard^s Criteria for the Life History (1935)
and Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937) also exemplify a conscious interest in
making biases explicit even if they do not reach a methodology centered on explicit value
premises. Robert Maciver’s Social Causation (1942) and Robert Lynd’s Knowledge For
What? (1939) are other sociological books which are free of implicit value premises.
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