Beyond Hume’s Guillotine
Descriptive and Prescriptive Formalism.—A formal language can be used to describe a given state-of-affairs (describing the properties of a state-of-affairs amenable to formalization) while object-formalism can reconstruct formal analogues of a given state-of-affairs (again, reconstructing only the formal aspects of the state-of-affairs in question). Insofar as we understand formalism as the capture of that which is given in intuition, the state-of-affairs, i.e., the intuition in question, always precedes the formalization. However, a formal language can also be used to assert what state-of-affairs ought to be, and object-formalism can demonstrate how states-of-affairs ought to be structured (both, again, only in regard to the formal properties of the state-of-affairs). Arguably, while in the intuitive conception of formalization the object to be formalized is always given beforehand, the prescriptive conception of formalization is always hovering in the background, pointing onward. While prescriptive formalism is less familiar than descriptive formalism, a little thought on the matter will reveal that every state-of-affairs that strains to attain an ideal, or any concept rationally reconstructed to supersede its naïve form, are prescriptive ideals that aspire to be embodied as a state-of-affairs. All predictive science can be assimilated to prescription if we understand experiments to be a test of whether the world is as it ought to be if it is consistent with a given theory.
