How Social Science Hides Its Values While Claiming Objectivity

The fact-value distinction inherited from logical positivism functions as a foundational norm in psychological and social science: researchers study what is, leaving prescriptive questions to ethicists. In practice, this distinction operates less as intellectual hygiene and more as a mechanism of concealment. The constructs that organize empirical research — social competence, authoritative parenting, moral development, psychological well-being — are not value-neutral natural kinds. They are normative categories that encode judgments about desirable endpoints, proper conduct, and developmental direction. One cannot operationalize "authoritative parenting" without presupposing a culturally specific account of legitimate authority. The construct does not describe a fact; it enacts a value.

This produces what can be called epistemological bad faith. By claiming value-neutrality, researchers do not eliminate normative commitments — they render them invisible. Values enter through construct selection, instrument design, sample framing, and interpretive conventions, then exit as "objective findings" insulated from normative scrutiny. When Western-derived parenting typologies are applied cross-culturally, the result is not empirical discovery but normative imposition operating under empirical cover.

The corrective is not relativism but radical reflexivity: a disciplined practice of surfacing the values, cultural locations, and pre-understandings that structure inquiry at every level. This approach does not weaken scientific claims — it strengthens them by requiring corroboration across multiple perspectival standpoints. Inconsistencies between perspectives become productive signals rather than noise to be suppressed. The standard of evidence becomes more demanding, not less, because the researcher can no longer appeal to a fictive objectivity to foreclose debate about the normative architecture of their work.