Abstract

The value-free ideal (VFI)Value-free ideal (VFI)Value-free ideal (VFI) has played a significant role in the recent philosophical literature on “values and scienceValues and science.” The current dominant position among philosophers of science is that the VFI should be rejected. Despite the centrality of the VFI for the literature on values and scienceValues and science, I argue in this chapter that it has not been adequately scrutinized. Douglas’s foundational characterization of the VFI focuses on excluding values from a particular group of scientific activities (namely, the “internal” judgments involved in evaluating and accepting scientific results), but one could characterize the VFI in a more or less stringent manner depending on which aspects of science one thought should be preserved as free from value influences and in what ways. I focus on three central concepts to construct a three-part framework for organizing different ways that it can be characterized. I suggest that one can arrive at different characterizations of the VFI depending on how one interprets values, what one means by freedom from value influences, and what kind of an idealIdeals one is putting forward. I conclude that it would be better to formulate the VFI not in terms of a single characterization but rather in terms of a multiplicity of distinct but related characterizations.