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Source: Wikipedia.org article, adapted under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ license.

The fact–value distinction is the modern label for an ancient belief that rational human knowledge is bipolar--split in two. Human groups must have collective knowledge of means able to achieve their ends, and of ends able to meet their needs. Means have come to be labeled fact, and ends labeled value.

Fact is instrumental knowledge of means as tools that "work"--like science and technology. Value is moral knowledge of ends as rules of "right and wrong"--like "Honesty is the best policy." Belief that such collective knowledge is bipolar grew out of philosophers' attempts to understand how humans coordinate group behavior to maintain social life. Thinkers imputed instrumental knowledge to heads or minds or brains. They imputed moral knowledge to hearts or guts or souls. They themselves divided into realists who understood facts and idealists who understood values.

Bipolar knowledge correlates group behavior rationally when the poles work together: instrumental means achieve valued ends: "Mission accomplished!" But when the poles disagree--if hearts know that something working is undesirable, or heads know that right intentions can't work--the result is disunity: "Mission not accomplished." When rational knowledge fails to correlate means and ends, people don't know whether to believe their head or their heart, and come to doubt the capacity of reason to establish truth.

Faced with this failure, people act as if they can choose rationally between head and heart. They become partisans: "realists" who claim their facts alone are rational, and "idealists" who claim their values alone are rational.

But if either pole of knowledge is irrational, group knowledge ceases to be true--efficient means without ends, or right ends without means. The contaminated pole becomes dogmatic class- and culture-bound opinion: "conventional wisdom," "selfish" or "tribal" interests, "politically correct" institutions, "truthiness." Two examples epitomize what happens when either pole becomes dogmatic.

Former Senator Daniel Moynihan stated the realist denial that the heart's value is rational:

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.:epigraph

Stating Moynahan's meaning in fact-value terms: Value, as everyone knows, is fact-free: purposeful but groundless opinion, powerless to coordinate social action. By contrast, instrumental means are rational tools that work to correlate social action. Fact is TRUTH! Obey facts!

TV humorist Stephen Colbert sarcastically stated the idealist denial that head-known fact is rational:

I don't trust books.--They're all fact, no heart ... Face it, folks, we are a divided nations ... divided between those who thing with their head and those who know with their heart ... Because that's where the truth comes from, ... the gut,:4

Stating Colbert's meaning in fact-value terms: Fact, as everyone knows, is value-free: grounded but purposeless data, powerless to guide social life. By contrast, emotional ends are right rules intended to correlate social action. Value is JUSTICE! Obey value.

This article explains how an apparently theoretical academic distinction underlies much current social controversy. Belief that rational knowledge is either value-free fact or fact-free value explains this impasse of rationality. The article describes how key thinkers in recent centuries have redefined, endorsed, and rejected both poles, making homo sapiens irrational.