Williams, Dewey, and the nature of value inquiry

For Bernard Williams, ethical inquiry is fundamentally about sense-making: it starts from what we already care about, and is always local. As a result, Williams opposes scientistic models of philosophy, arguing that philosophy should be seen as ‘part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and our activities’. This paper critiques the assumptions about disciplinarity on which Williams’s argument is based, and uses some resources from Dewey’s pragmatism to propose some friendly amendments to Williams’s account of the nature of value inquiry. Rather than seeking to assign philosophy either to the humanities or the sciences, it is more fruitful to examine philosophy through the lens of a transdisciplinary epistemology, in which incompatible methodologies and ontologies and how to reconcile them, are central. What is required is less a shift from scientistic to humanistic conceptions of philosophy, than for philosophers working in value inquiry to better align their aspirations for theory with what it can actually deliver.