The Philosophical Approach to Marriage and Family Research

T THE dawn of the modern era our western A civilization was largely under the dogmatic authoritarian control of religious institutions. Free inquiry on most subjects was not tolerated. Gradually a few thinkers dared free inquiry into problems of nature and soon modern science had gained so much impetus that it could not be held under the strict control of the institutionalized guardians of the established beliefs. However, the victory of free inquiry was not unconditional, but rather a truce based on a compromise, the terms of which are fairly clear. Free inquiry would be allowed in the realm of natural facts provided that value beliefs would be left to authoritarian control. Perhaps the relative backwardness of our knowledge in the realm of values and hence our incapacity to deal with many of our contemporary social problems spring from the terms of this truce. It seems evident that free inquiry in the realm of values is a necessary condition of any satisfactory approach to the fundamental crises in our civilization. The extensive research being carried on in the realm of marriage and family relations by specialists from a variety of fields indicates that free inquiry is at last assaulting even the province of values most dear to and most strongly guarded by dogmatic authoritarian forces. This is indeed encouraging. The one fact about marriage and family research which is especially interesting from a philosophical point of view is that it claims to be scientific and yet results in value judgments. It is true that many scientists in this field attempt to avoid value judgments and some even claim to counsel without making value judgments. However, in most such cases the researcher or counselor only refrains from the traditional value judgments dictated by the mores of the culture. In marriage counseling one cannot escape value judgments and the researcher in the field of marriage and family relations often asserts value statements as verified by his inquiry. Scientific inquiry's discovering axiological truths is at least an apparent anomaly or paradox. Our problem is to give a logical analysis of such inquiry in order to determine in what sense and to what extent it is scientific and whether it can validly result in confirmed value statements. First of all, let us consider scientific inquiry. An analysis of any kind of inquiry must consider its cognitive goal, conceptual scheme, and method. It is often said that the cognitive goal of scientific inquiry is truth or knowledge. However, it is more precise to say that it is descriptive-explanatory knowledge, which answers the question "What?" about an event through description in terms of the scientific conceptual scheme and "Why?" by giving reasons for the event's happening as it did and not otherwise. Such reasons, in addition, may be used for prediction. Actually the logical structure of an explanation and a prediction are exactly the same. The conceptual scheme of science is forged in light of its congnitive goal. Hence we may characterize it as a descriptive-explanatory conceptual scheme. Concepts are formulated by abstracting the properties of events which are considered important for description leading to explanation and the formation of such logical constructs as are required for theoretical explanation. All statements formulated out of the scientific concepts and verifiable by the scientific method are expressed by declarative sentences. They assert or declare that such and such was, is, or will be the case, or that if such and such had been or should be the case, some specified state of affairs would have been or would be the case. From what has been said it follows that the corpus of scientific statements contains no valuejustificatory statements, statements with value predicates leading to justification. It is true that the science of economics is concerned with value statements, but the value statements are of the descriptive-explanatory or descriptive-predictive type and never of the descriptive-justificatory type. If this is the case, in so far as marriage and family research is pure scientific inquiry it cannot * Read before the Ninth Annual Conference on Marriage and the Family, Durham, North Carolina, April 27, 1950..