Since David Hume it has been all but axiomatic among analytic philosophers that no ought can be derived from an is. Statements vested with moral or valuative content, held to derive only from presentiment, are seen as occupying a different logical category from statements of fact. This dogma pervades much of the academic world, and one of its widespread effects is to leave much of that world mystified and powerless to connect the rhetoric of knowledge convincingly with that of judgment and action. The doctrine sets philosophy at odds with what we must do as human beings, whose need to act often does not run in sync with the knowledge at hand, but whose failure to act will have practical consequences. The official story should make us flounder at the point of" imposing" a value judgment and demur from action, should we not know what logic warrants it. We would tremble in our awareness of jumping the chasm between logical types.

The psychological brunt of this conflict is softened by accepted strategies of deferring judgment (" Hamletic" strategies, Kenneth Burke [1969] calls them), such as calling for more research. At the same time, the notion that knowledge in itself contains no moral lesson represses understanding of the ways that the discourses of knowledge harbor moral and aesthetic lessons of all sorts. Being" taken in" is only one of the costs of such repression; another is the failure to appreciate discursive resources of the sort necessary for making powerful connectives between fact and affect. These connectives are fuzzy-logically unclean-and therefore often jettisoned once noticed.