
Max Webers’ idea of value neutrality has been an important challenge for sociology. As a science of practical aspirations sociology has aimed to maintan a balance between epistemic objectivity and social criticism. The latter was hoped to provide public debate with inspiration and mediating social discourse. The author of the paper is advocating for an interpretation of Webers’ relevant texts that would deny the apparent contadiction between the concepts of Wertfreiheit and Wertbeziehung, and view them as logically interrelated. He suggests that the idea of value neutrality, as formulated by Weber, follows from his concept of value reference. As claimed in the paper, in his texts Weber outlined a picture of the human way of cognition that may be interpreted as a response to the dilemmas of value-oriented points of view.