In his essay "Two Dogmas o.f Empiricism" W. O. Quine identified the two unquestioned assumptions of empiricism as the belief in the radical distinction between analytic and synthetic truths, and reductionism. There is also a third dogma of empiricism which may not be universally shared by all empiricists, but which is a fundamental assumption of empiricism in general. That is the belief that factual statements are value-free or are entirely distinct from, or unrelated to, values of valuation. It will be my intention here to try to show that this dogma is a questionable one and one which attributes to factual assertions or factual judgments a putative epistemic neutrality which, in fact, they do not possess. Although it will be urged that the distinction between facts and values is both useful and inevitable, this distinction is not as radical as some empiricists might maintain. Although it may generally be agreed today that values are, in a sense, empirical facts, I think that few would agree that, in a sense -a non-trivial sense -facts are value-laden.
Before discussing the way or ways in which values infiltrate factual claims, a few questions concerning the nature of facts must be raised. It is paradoxical that, although everyone would say that there are facts, there is considerable controversy concerning the nature o~ facts themselves. The term "fact" is itself somewhat vague. On the one hand, there are those philosophers who maintain that facts simply are and are not, unlike propositions, either true of false. On the other hand, there are those (for example, C. J. Ducasse) who claim that facts are propositions of a certain kind. Traditionally, facts have been described as "objective data" or the phenomena which factual statements refer to or "picture." Facts are identified with what makes propositions true. Those who claimed that propositions "picture" facts (like the early Wittgenstein) presuppose a correspondence theory of truth which is itself undermined by the epistemological structure which is built upon its assumption. That is, the statement, "Language pictures the world or the totality of facts," is neither a tautology nor an analytic proposition nor an empirically significant proposition. Hence; the nature of its claim to truth is undeterminable. Although so large a question is not our concern here, it is clear that the question of the relationship between language and facts is relevant to the question of the nature of facts. Moritz