Perhaps you could attach your paper here so that we  can read it.

The problem you point out was already raised by David Hume: the Is / Ought dichotomy. We know that Hume's position was, borrowing your lexicon here, no descriptive statement leads to prescription. This is a longstanding question.

Your comment is, please tell me if I misread, (1) science is divided into descriptive  and normative studies, AND (2) this divide or dichotomy should probably come to an end.

My opinion on:

First part of your statement: This is plausible although there are many other divides within science, e.g., positivist/post-positivist; inductive/fallibilist; structuralist/post-structuralist (e.g. social science, psychology).

Second part of your statement: I think your claim of 'putting an end' is almost metaphorical. Do you mean blindfolding yourself to avoid seeing the factual divide? Or, you mean that science DOES NOT, BY ITSELF, tilt towards neither 'is'  nor 'ought'. (To understand the depth and validity of your claim, I would need to read your paper)

I forgot to mention that it takes a human will to act upon a visible fact.

In my opinion, most of the scientific claims and statements are descriptive, and it is our will that turn them into one or more "I should" or "We should." Intriguingly enough, it is in doing so that the divide between 'is' and 'ought'  becomes blurry. A showcase would be studies on global warming.

 @Jae: I am aware of the is -> ought divide. However it's not because descriptive statements do not determine normative statements entirely, that normative statements shouldn't at least be informed by what we descriptively know about the subject matter.

Take the doctor as an example. No descriptive study will ever conclusively determine whether or not it is good or bad to perform euthanasia, however understanding how the brain functions can inform a decision by allowing for example to put a probability on the chances of a person regaining consciousness. 

The same goes for science. As I see it, many philosophers of science simply misunderstand the kind of thing science is and don't even bother to find out whether they're right or wrong. Instead they obsess about toy examples that make abstraction of the details from which most of the normative problems that exist in the real world arise. And then when it turns out that their normative guidance is largely irrelevant to actual policy makers and scientists, they say it's their problem, that they're not being rational and so much the worse for science and policy. 

Dear Rogier, I wonder about your question: "Is it the case that this divide between the normative and descriptive study of science exists to this day, and isn't it time it came to an end? - ResearchGate." Of course, the ideal of 'descriptive study', is a normative point of view in itself. But I agree that it would be good if researchers from various disciplines would collaborate more on the subject of scientific progress. At the level of research organizations I tried to do so, together with Peter van den Besselaar (University of Amsterdam) in case studies on CWTS and Hubrecht Laboratory. You can find these at my Research Gate Profile. Therein we try to combine work from the rather separated fields of Organizational ecology and Scientometrics (including sociology of science). The idea is that if you study the life history of a single organization, thus its long term development, we may learn about factors influencing this. Results sofar: both internal and external factors influence the succes of a research organization in a stepwise fashion, related to the successive scientific leaders of the organization, that goes together with changes in product-audience (or client-market) combinations the group/organisation focusses its activities on to survive an do what is thinks best. The dichotomy of descriptive and normative is less pressing in such an ecological approach. I think it a good idea if philosophers of science came out of their secure toy-boxes and participate in these kind of studies.

A descriptive study of science is possibly normative in the sense that ascription of a goal to science as an enterprize is per definition laying down normative criteria on science. Given an ascription of a goal (say, as an epistemic or pragmatic enterprize) and a charactarization of various disciplines and developments as attempts at realizing or contributing to such a goal - and a description of the actual workings of the enterprize - amounts to something like a normative theory. Say that the goal of science is sometimes the construction and evaluation of theories, and that this is done in such and such a way. This provides two possibilities (speaking broadly). Namely that the workings of science is adequate or inadequate relative to its goal.

If one assumes, as one probably should, that science does work, overall, as intended (or as usually interpreted as working), then an epistemic problem could consist in accounting for this possibility - taking off in some description of science. I think this correctly reflects what philosophy of science is usually in the business of doing.

And philosophers as well as scientists who discuss inadequacies of methods, or misconceptions of possible goals, are usually taking off in precisely a prior description of both the end and the means. Thus empiricists have been criticized for misconstruing the means (linguistic or epistemic means) of science, while rationalists have been criticized for the same.

I don't think the two projects can be divorced, and I don't think they should be. And I further believe that they are both crucial. Haven't read your paper, so I might misunderstand the problem you want to discuss. 

Kind regards,

Luca 

@ Rogier

Sorry for coming back this late.

I agree with your post on April 8 and I am reading your 2014 article slowly. So far, I find your statements on Popper and Kuhn accurate and intelligently visualized  with  Bak-Sneppen model. I have difficulties to understand how the values (coordinates) of the dots in the plot were assigned. Nevertheless, the graphs accurately support your reading (also mine) of Popper and Kuhn's respective theory of scientific progress.

Said that, and going back to your original question in this thread, I agree with you that descriptive statements often lead human agents (e.g. doctors, politicians and practitioners, the same example as yours) to turn them into prescriptions. We seem to be in the same page here.

Nevertheless, I think your statement "isn't it time it came to an end?" would not be fully acceptable to, at least, those who believe that there has been never a clear dichotomy, that is, on the ground that one cannot put an end to something that never started.

Anyhow, I find this thread intellectually engaging. Thanks