colleges of agriculture, state Agricultural Experiment
Stations and state Cooperative Extension Services, while
those of the NSF/NAS/NRC are largely outside colleges
of agriculture in both land-grant and non-land-grant
universities.
 The critical activists have no clearly identifiable power
center. Members of Congress respond in different ways
to the various activists. Several government agencies-
including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Environ-
mental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Admini-
stration, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department
of Interior, National Science Foundation, National In-
stitutes of Health, National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce-have
been given additional authority to deal with activist con-
cerns. These agencies, in turn, have developed power
to influence decisions about agricultural research on
nutrition, environmental quality, energy, the use of non-
renewable resources, product safety, the use and hous-
ing of farm labor, food stamps, food prices, world
hunger and international research assistance for agri-
culture.
 The humanists and social scientists probably have the
weakest power base of the three groups. They sometimes
derive power from the activist critics and, in turn,
sometimes support them. Such alliances, however, are
uneasy because the humanists and social scientists are
too academic and objective to be reliable allies or to work
as hard as the activists in exercising political power.
Within the ARE, social scientists often defect from
defense of the ARE because they resent what they regard
as undue domination of the agricultural research agenda
by biological/physical science departments (National
Academy of Sciences, 1977; Johnson, forthcoming-a).
These defections sometimes support the arguments of the
activist critics and of the academic humanists.

Knowledge Bases for Administrators
and Researchers of the ARE
 Decisions about agricultural science policy, priorities,
goals and objectives are properly based on descriptive
knowledge, both normative (about goodness and bad-
ness) and positive (not about goodness and badness),
processed through various decision rules to select optimal
actions. Differences between the ARE and its critics over
agricultural science prescriptions can originate in either
conflicting information bases, both positive and norma-
tive, or the use of different decision rules that reflect
different power bases.
 The knowledge base of the ARE tends to be more
 positivistic than normative. The ARE's positive
 agricultural knowledge is obviously excellent. On the
 other hand, the positivism of the ARE's biological/
 physical scientists mitigates against the development of


objective normative information about values, either
overall or in exchange, and either monetary or non-
monetary. Knowledge of market prices is often
mistrusted and misused by both the ARE and its critics.
Both often fail to understand that prices are measures
of monetary exchange values instead of measures of
overall value, and that exchange values are always par-
tially determined by distributions of market power.
Prices reflect basic values but are not basic values ex-
cept in the sense of being derived from them. Agricul-
tural economists and other rural social scientists in the
ARE sometimes are also so positivistic that they do lit-
tle better on normative information than their
biological/physical science counterparts, either inside or
outside the ARE.
 The knowledge about goodness and badness used by
the biological/physical scientists of the ARE and by its
biological/physical science critics is often rather intuitive,
simplistic and arbitrary. Examples include the use of
energy accounts and the universal soil loss equations as
measures of the badness of energy consumption and soil
movement (Johnson, 1981, 1974). Use of such simplistic
measures of value may be attributed to the logical
positivism of the biological/physical scientists, which
tends to preclude the use of experience in developing
normative knowledge.

 On the other hand, the knowledge that humanists and
urbanized social scientists have about agricultural values
is often appallingly weak. Many lack experience with
farms and farmers, rural and farm environments, farm
production processes, farm problems, agribusinesses and
the agricultural sciences from which they could derive
descriptive knowledge of values. And some philosophies
emphasize metaphysical speculation as a source of
knowledge about values. Despite these shortcomings, the
humanists and social scientists are sometimes aware of
neglected values that permit them to put important
neglected problems and subjects on the agricultural
research agenda.
 The activists often trap themselves into advocating
questionable prescriptions because they lack crucial
positive and/or normative information. When they err
in their positive knowledge, ARE personnel can easily
provide the correct knowledge. However, when they err
in their normative knowledge, the biological/physical
scientists in the ARE are not well equipped philo-
sophically to provide correct knowledge about values.
As normatively uninformed pro-ARE activists are not
effective in defending the ARE against prescriptions
from normatively uninformed anti-ARE activists, such
exchanges are often unfruitful.
 Unfortunately, knowledge bases are sometimes dis-
 torted by self-seeking "interpretations," especially when
 available knowledge is so poor that such interpretations