To the degree that policy analysis includes these three aims it includes but goes beyond the aims of traditional social science disciplines. These disciplines have so far tended to avoid valuative and normative approaches, in part because of deep-seared belief in the separability of facts and values has sometimes contributed to misunderstandings about the methodology and aims of policy analysis. Prescriptions on recommendations are identified with policy advocacy, which is often viewed as a way to make emotional appeals and ideological pronouncements or to engage in political activism, rather than as a way to produce policy-relevant information and plausible arguments about possible solutions for public problems.
This mistaken view of policy advocacy as a nonrational process is closely related to value relativism, that is, the belief that values are purely subjective and relative to the person who holds them. Values relativism leads to the position that values can neither be debated rationally nor studied with the methods of science. The belief that values have no rational content is related to the tendency to confuse prescriptive statements with unconditional imperatives, commands, pronouncements, or emotional appeals of various kinds (the original Latin meaning of “to prescribe” refers to acts of directing, ordering, or commanding in accordance with authority). Yet the act of recommending what people should do is not the same as telling or exhorting them to do it; it is rather “purporting to give them sound solutions to their practical problems.
The argument goes that applied research is radically different from basic scientific work and therefore detracts talent and resources from true progress in the discipline. This implies a false comparison with the comparison with the natural sciences. It is true that technical engineers could not succeed without the knowledge provided by abstract research in mathematics and laboratory experiments of the “pure” sciences. But it is misleading to draw an analogy between the natural and social sciences. Nowhere in the social realm are there unconditional laws and basic theories already well established. Quite to the contrary, it is the study of concrete and circumscribed practical problem-areas that has contributed a good part of the present-day general sociological knowledge.