A tool or appliance, such as a hammer or washing machine, has instrumental value because it helps one pound in a nail or clean clothes, respectively.
The classic names instrumental and intrinsic were coined by sociologist Max Weber, who spent years studying good meanings people assigned to their actions and beliefs.
Philosopher Anjan Chakravartty argued that instrumental value is only legitimate when it produces good scientific theories compatible with the intrinsic truth of mind-independent reality.
[3][4]: 37–44 To reduce ambiguity, throughout this article the noun value names a criterion of judgment, as opposed to valuation which is an object that is judged valuable.
Immanuel Kant is famously quoted as saying:So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only.
The classic names instrumental and intrinsic were coined by sociologist Max Weber, who spent years studying good meanings people assigned to their actions and beliefs.
He argues that both efficient and legitimate qualities must be discovered in daily life:Man who lives in a world of hazards…has sought to attain [security] in two ways.
It expressed itself in supplication, sacrifice, ceremonial rite and magical cult.… The other course is to invent [instrumental] arts and by their means turn the powers of nature to account.…[8]: 3 [F]or over two thousand years, the…most influential and authoritatively orthodox tradition…has been devoted to the problem of a purely cognitive certification (perhaps by revelation, perhaps by intuition, perhaps by reason) of the antecedent immutable reality of truth, beauty, and goodness.… The crisis in contemporary culture, the confusions and conflicts in it, arise from a division of authority.
Scientific [instrumental] inquiry seems to tell one thing, and traditional beliefs [intrinsic valuations] about ends and ideals that have authority over conduct tell us something quite different.… As long as the notion persists that knowledge is a disclosure of [intrinsic] reality…prior to and independent of knowing, and that knowing is independent of a purpose to control the quality of experienced objects, the failure of natural science to disclose significant values [valuations] in its objects will come as a shock.
[8]: 43–4 Finding no evidence of "antecedent immutable reality of truth, beauty, and goodness," Dewey argues that both efficient and legitimate goods are discovered in the continuity of human experience:[8]: 114, 172–3, 197 Dewey's ethics replaces the goal of identifying an ultimate end or supreme principle that can serve as a criterion of ethical evaluation with the goal of identifying a method for improving our value judgments.
Dewey argued that ethical inquiry is of a piece with empirical inquiry more generally.… This pragmatic approach requires that we locate the conditions of warrant for our value judgments in human conduct itself, not in any a priori fixed reference point outside of conduct, such as in God's commands, Platonic Forms, pure reason, or "nature," considered as giving humans a fixed telos [intrinsic end].
[10]Philosophers label a "fixed reference point outside of conduct' a "natural kind," and presume it to have eternal existence knowable in itself without being experienced.
[17]: 60 In modern North-American culture, this utilitarian belief supports the libertarian assertion that every individual's intrinsic right to satisfy wants makes it illegitimate for anyone—but especially governments—to tell people what they ought to do.
As we have seen, to say that an economic problem exists is to say that part of the particular patterns of human relationships has ceased or failed to provide the effective participation of its members.
Scholars continue to accept the possibility and necessity of knowing "what ought to be" independently of transient conditions that determine actual consequences of every action.
Jacques Ellul made scholarly contributions to many fields, but his American reputation grew out of his criticism of the autonomous authority of instrumental value, the criterion that John Dewey and J. Fagg Foster found to be the core of human rationality.
His principal work, published in 1954, bore the French title La technique and tackles the problem that Dewey addressed in 1929: a culture in which the authority of evolving technology destroys traditional valuations without creating legitimate new ones.
In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.
He blames instrumental valuations for destroying intrinsic meanings of human life: "Think of our dehumanized factories, our unsatisfied senses, our working women, our estrangement from nature.
[24]: 147–8 Ellul's core accusation is that instrumental efficiency has become absolute, i.e., a good-in-itself;[22]: 83 it wraps societies in a new technological milieu with six intrinsically inhuman characteristics:[4]: 22
"[25]: xi, 10 Well-confirmed theories—"what ought to be" as the end of reasoning—are more than tools; they are maps of intrinsic properties of an unobservable and unconditional territory—"what is" as natural-but-metaphysical real kinds.
[25]: xiii, 33, 149 Chakravartty treats criteria of judgment as ungrounded opinion, but admits that realists apply the instrumental criterion to judge theories that "work.
Later experience might confirm a singular judgment only if it proves to have universal validity, meaning it possesses "detection properties" of natural kinds.
That is, predictively successful (mature, non-ad hoc) theories, taken literally as describing the nature of a mind-independent reality are (approximately) true.
He finds these carefully qualified statements necessary to replace earlier realist claims of intrinsic reality discredited by advancing instrumental valuations.
They regularly cohere to form interesting units, and these groupings make up the particulars investigated by the sciences and described by scientific theories.
The fact that theoretical kinds are frequently replaced does not mean that mind-independent reality is changing, but simply that theoretical maps are approximating intrinsic reality.The primary motivation for thinking that there are such things as natural kinds is the idea that carving nature according to its own divisions yields groups of objects that are capable of supporting successful inductive generalizations and prediction.
... Pragmatic constraints such as these play a role in shaping how scientific investigations are conducted, and together which and how many potentially relevant factors [intrinsic kinds] are incorporated into models and descriptions during the process of abstraction.
The role of pragmatic constraints, however, does not undermine the idea that putative representations of factors composing abstract models can be thought to have counterparts in the [mind-independent] world.