• 사회경제평론
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.307-346
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• 2018

Gunnar Myrdal has struggled throughout his academic life with the problem of the role of valuations in social sciences. His earlier viewpoint was that valuations should be completely separated from scientific analysis on facts. But he soon fundamentally changed his viewpoint. His later viewpoint was that social scientists should disclose his valuations, for valuations intervene all the processes of scientific researches. Value premises are the valuations coherently reconstructed and manifestly articulated. Myrdal argued that social scientists should disclose value premises and perform his analysis and normative judgement based on the value premises. And the value premises should be derived from the valuations held by the large or significant groups of the society under study, not from the researcher's own valuations. This paper tried to show that Myrdal's later viewpoint must meet the crux, that researcher's own viewpoint must intervene in choosing valuations of particular group among diverse groups in the society under stduy, and in deriving and reconstructing value premises from the valuations of that group. And it argued that the reason why Myrdal met the crux could be explained by that he accepted the emotivism of Axel $H{\ddot{a}}gersr{\ddot{o}}m$. And it proposed some methodological solutions for escaping the crux Myrdal met, while preserving the positive elements of Myrdals' viewpoint.