Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce and Democracy

[Mike Bergman]

List, I was imprecise in my use of the qualifier "all" in my statement, "In the end, it is all wrong." The correct qualifier that I meant to say is "partially". And, by "partially" I also do not mean to imply that I personally know or believe what portions of the argument may be wrong, just that "truth" in a Peircean sense as I understand it is a limit function that can be approximated and approached, but never fully achieved. I apologize to Edwina for my imprecise language. I think there are some fascinating questions raised by Edwina's thesis posed by our move as a global economy to where wealth comes increasingly from accumulated knowledge and intelligent machines rather than human workers. I have posed those questions to her offline. Mike On 11/20/2016 12:01 AM, Mike Bergman wrote: Stefan, the questions you ask for data and methodology are natural and understandable in terms of Peirce's abiding guidance on the scientific method and fallibility. Edwina, the evidence you offer is the best available given our current state of knowledge, and represents a reasonable and supportable hypothesis given the evidence. I think Peirce would approve of the inquiry of this thread, but not the last snide tone of your response, Stefan. This has been an interesting thread, and Edwina has put forward one of the more cogent summaries of how to look at the question of "why democracy" I have seen. In the end, it is all wrong, but it is something to strive to learn more from, not dismiss. Best, Mike On 11/19/2016 11:53 PM, sb wrote: Edwina, oh, this is a Peirce list, that's interesting, isn't it? What kind of red hering is this? You keep writing this stuff on this list for years over and over again. Now, when someone asks you for some evidence of your "theory" you say you can't provide it because this is a Peirce list? Why the heck do state that stuff in the first place on this list over and over again? Asking for evidence is quite a natural thing for scientists - not willing to provide it for ideologists. Got nothing more to say and ask. Best, Stefan Am 20. November 2016 03:36:35 MEZ, schrieb Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca>: Stefan - I can't deal with your questions on this list, as it is a site devoted to Peirce - and Peirce has nothing to do with ecological analysis of societal adaptation.   i may deal with it off-list - but your questions are, to me, rather strange, for you seem to be approaching societal adaptation as if it were some kind of chemical formula carried out in a laboratory. There are plenty of books on 'cultural ecology' [look up the term]- which is basically what I'm talking about [R. Netting, E. Moran.] And plenty of books dealing with non-industrial societies, their physical environments, their societal systems, their economies, their populations sizes..etc. There are all kinds of data on population dynamics among various groups..   As for technological change - there are equally well-documented works on the development of technology, the development of sources of energy [manpower, animal, wind, water, fossil fuels, etc]. The development of towns, of currency, roads, ...literacy etc...And there are plenty of books on societal organization and the development of the middle class market economy in the West. [J.D. Bernal, Ferdinand Braudel..]   Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: sb To: Gary Richmond ; Peirce-L Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2016 8:34 PM Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce and Democracy Edwina, where can we find these descriptive data? Did you use archival data? Did you do any fieldwork? Has it been published? What sources do you draw on? How did you conduct your qualitative research? What hypotheses guided your qualitative research? Have documented how you get to your conclusions? Could you provide us your analytical framework? What are the exact cases you did study? What are the dimensions of comparison between the cases? Where are they similar? Where are they different? What is your ecological analysis based on? Where did you get the ecological data? How did you link it with the cases you have studied? Have your heard of Qualitative Comparative Analysis? In short: Could you please provide us information on what data you did use, where to find these data, how you analyzed the data and where to find the documentation of your analysis to back up any of your claims? "Looking" at "the West", "late industrialism" and "climate", is a bit abstract, isn't it? I would really appreciate if you could elaborate a bit more on data and how you arrived at your conclusions, than on the conclusions themselfes.  Best, Stefan Am 20. November 2016 01:35:38 MEZ, schrieb Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca>: Stefan - the analysis is based on descriptive data of the ecological anthropological analyses of various socioeconomic peoples - hunting/gathering; the different types of agriculturalism - wet and dry horticulture, pastoral nomadic, rainfall agriculture...and early and late industrialism. It includes first a consideration of the ecological realities in the area; second the socioeconomic descriptions of the way [kinship, political, legal] that people have adapted to those ecological realities..and third, the history and technological developments ...particularly of the West. Why the West? Because it has the richest most fertile biome on the planet - which is why its population kept increasing and why it eventually had to, with difficulty, change its technology to support that increased population.   Data would be based around ecological factors: arable land and soil, water type and availability [ie, desert, tundra, seasonal, irrigation, rainfall, rainforest..] ; climate and temperatures;  plant and animal types and the domestication capacities of both; carrying capacity of the land; carrying capacity of the technology to extract food/sustenance;   Then, you'd look at population size. And then societal systems - such as kinship systems, and political systems.   There is no lab test possible; there are no falsifying assumptions. It's pure description of 'the ecological realities and the societal forms of actual peoples. Then, one can generalize. And it's interesting to see how peoples - completely out of touch with each other - have nevertheless developed the SAME societal structures if they are in similar ecological realities.   Edwina         ----- Original Message ----- From: sb To: Edwina Taborsky ; Gary Richmond ; Peirce-L Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2016 6:35 PM Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce and Democracy Edwina, i would be really interested how you tackled such a complex theoretical concept empirically. Which historic datasets of demography and economics did you use? To build up such a database must have been quite labourious! I would also be really interested in how you operationalized your theory? What constructs and variables did you use? In which datasets are they found? How did you model your assumptions statistically? In testing your theory, what were your initial hypotheses? Where have you been able to falsify or verify your assumptions? Where did you struggle empirically because of data quality? Best, Stefan Am 19. November 2016 22:48:20 MEZ, schrieb Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca>: Yes - I've taught this relationship between economics, population size and political infrastructure for about 20 years. No- it's not really in the Architectonics  book. It IS in a graphic book, The Graphic Guide to Socioeconomics - which a retired CEO banker and myself have just finished [about 170 slides]....which deals with the pragmatic relations between population size and economic modes and political modes.  I am not sure if I should attach it since is has nothing to do with Peirce. It's a powerpoint presentation which we are planning to promote as a 'graphic guide for dummies' on the topic, so to speak.   That is - we tried to make it clear that democracy, which means 'political power of the majority decision' is suitable only in large population, flexible-risktaking- growth economies, and unsuitable in small population no-growth steady-state economies which must ensure their economic continuity by focusing on retaining the capacity-to-make-wealth by stable measures [control of the land, control of the cattle, control of fishing rights, etc].   And we've been very surprised in our test runs with various people - how many people don't understand the basic issues of growth/no growth economies, carrying capacity of the economy; growth vs steady-state populations; what is a middle class; what is capitalism; the role of risk; the role of individuals..etc. etc.   Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: Gary Richmond To: Peirce-L Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2016 4:20 PM Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce and Democracy Edwina, list, You've clearly given this a lot of prior thought, Edwina. I want to reflect on wht you wrote and see what others think before commenting further. Btw, would looking again at your book, Architectonics of Semiosis, for example, Chapter 2, "Purity and Power," be of any value in this discussion (as I initially began reading it I recall that in an off-list message you commented that in some ways you were now seeing things quite differently than you did in 1998)? Best, Gary R Gary Richmond Philosophy and Critical Thinking Communication Studies LaGuardia College of the City University of New York C 745 718 482-5690 On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 4:01 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote: Gary R- that's an interesting topic.   1) I'd like to first comment that democracy, as a political system for arriving at authoritative government decisions, is the 'right' method but ONLY in a very large population with a growth economy and a growth population. That is, political systems have FUNCTIONS; the function is: who has the societal right to make decisions among this population?   In economies which are no-growth, such as all the pre-industrial agricultural and horticultural economies which dominated the planet until the industrial age, democracy is dysfunctional. That is, all political systems must privilege the wealth-producing sectors of the population. If your economy is agricultural/horticultural - which can only produce enough wealth to support a steady-state or no-growth population, then, the political system must put the authority to make decisions in the control of the owners of wealth production; i.e., the landowners. This control over the land must be hereditary [you can't have fights over ownership], and limited [you can't split up the land into minuscule small farms].  Democracy, which puts decision-making into the hands of the majority, doesn't work in such an economy.   When the economy moves to a growth mode [and enables a growth population], the political system must empower those sectors of the population which make an economy grow. This is the middle class - a non-hereditary set of the population, made up of private individual/small group businesses. This economic mode is highly flexible [new business can start, succeed, fail]; extremely adaptable and enables rapid population growth. As such an economic mode, political decision-making must fall into the control of this middle class - and we have the emergence of elected legislatures and the disappearance of hereditary authority.   For a growth economy to work, it must support individual rights [to invent, differ from the norm, to succeed AND fail] so that failure, for example, will only affect those few individuals and not a whole village/collective. Therefore, individualism must be stressed and empowered; a growth economy must enable novelty, innovation, freedom of the periphery....as well as success, which is measured by the adoption by the collective of that product/service. FOR A WHILE.   2) But - it seems that the definition and function of democracy in Dewey does not deal with the economy and the questions of the production of wealth and size of population. Instead, it deals with social issues - Talisse writes:   "The core of Deweyan democracy can be stated as follows. Deweyan democracy is substantive rather than proceduralist, communicative rather than aggregative,and deep rather than statist. I shall take these contrasts in order.Deweyan democracy is substantive insofar as it rejects any attempt to separate politics and deeper normative concerns. More precisely, Dewey held that the democratic political order is essentially a moral order, and, further, he held that democratic participation is an essential constituent ofthe good life and a necessary constituent for a “truly human way of living”.... Dewey rejects the idea thatit consists simply in processes of voting, campaigning, canvassing, lobbying, and petitioning in service of one’s individual preferences; that is, Dewey held democratic participation is essentially communicative, it consists in the willingness of citizens to engage in activity by which they may “convince and be convinced by reason” (MW 10:404) and come to realize“values prized in common” (LW 13:71).   The above seems to me, to be a social relations account - and doesn't deal with the fact that democracy as a political system, empowers a particular segment of the population - the middle class, in an economy based around individual private sector small businesses. It has nothing to do with 'the good life' or a 'truly human way of living'. Nomadic pastoralists, and land-based feudal agriculture were also 'human ways of living.   3) From the Stanford Encyclopaedia, I found the following on Dewey:   "As Dewey puts it, ‘men are not isolated non-social atoms, but are men only when in intrinsic relations’ to one another, and the state in turn only represents them ‘so far as they have become organically related to one another, or are possessed of unity of purpose and interest’ (‘The Ethics of Democracy’,EW1, 231-2).   Dewey is anti-elitist, and argues that the capacity of the wise few to discern the public interest tends to be distorted by their position. Democratic participation is not only viewed as a bulwark against government by elites, but also as an aspect of individual freedom– humanity cannot rest content with a good ‘procured from without.’ Furthermore, democracy is not ‘simply and solely a form of government’, but a social and personal ideal; in other words, it is not only a property of political institutions but of a wide range of social relationships.   The above, seems to me, at this first glimpse, to totally ignore the economic mode - and again, some economies whose wealth production rests in stable, no-growth methods  [land food production] MUST ensure the stability of this economy by confining it to the few, i.e., those elites'...the wise few if you want to call them that'.   That is - the to put power in the majority/commonality rests with the economic mode. Certainly, Peirce's community of scholars was a method of slowly, gradually, arriving at 'the truth'. But this has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with governance and the question of who in a collective has the ultimate authority to make political decisions. That is, political decisions are not really, I suggest, the same as scientific or 'truth-based' inquiries. There is no ultimate 'best way' for much is dependent on resources, population size, environment..   And, I don't see a focus on the required capacity of a growth economy for rapid flexible adaptation - which HAS to be focused around the individual.  That is, risk-taking shouldn't involve the WHOLE collective, but only a few individuals.   4) As for Peirce's philosophy of democracy - again, Talisse writes: "the Peircean view relies upon no substantive moral vision. The Peircean justifies democratic institutions and norms strictly in terms of a set of substantive epistemic commitments. It says that no matter what one believes about the good life, the nature of the self, the meaning of human existence, or the value of community, one has reason to support a robust democratic political order of the sort described above simply in virtue of the fact that one holds beliefs. Since the Peircean conception of democracy does not contain a doctrine about “the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity” (EW 1:248), it can duly acknowledge the fact of reasonable pluralism. p 112 This seems to suggest that a societal system that enables exploratory actions by individuals is a 'robust democracy'. And, since a growth economic mode, that can support growth populations, requires risk-taking by flexible individuals to deal with current pragmatic problems - then, this seems to be a stronger political system. My key point is that the political system, economic mode and population size are intimately related. Edwina     ----- Original Message ----- From: Gary Richmond To: Peirce-L Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2016 2:59 PM Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce and Democracy  List, I read Robert B. Talisse's A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (2007) a few year ago and was thinking of it again today, in part prompted by an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Roger Cohen which quotes H. L. Mencken (see below). At the time of my reading PPD, I was not at all convinced that Talisee had demonstrated his principal thesis, namely, that we ought replace the inadequate, in his opinion, Dewyan approach to thinking about democracy with a Peircean based approach.   This is how David Hildebrand (U. of Colorado) outlined Talisse's argument in a review in The Notre Dame Philosophical Review. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23707-a-pragmatist-philosophy-of-democracy/ [Hildebrand] As I read PPD, I kept returning to two fundamental propellants powering Talisse's argument for a Peircean-based democratic theory. The first is constructive: his quest for a lean, non-normative pragmatist inquiry to provide just enough of a philosophical basis for a broadly effective conception of democracy. The second is destructive: the argument that political theorists should reject Dewey's self-refuting philosophy of democracy. Taken together, the insight is this: get over Dewey and accept this particular Peirce and we get just what we need from pragmatism for the purposes of democracy.  Hildebrand's review is a good introduction to the PPD. While I'm not much of a Deweyan, and I wouldn't presume to argue for or against his ideas, yet I don't think Talisse makes a strong case for a Peircean approach to political theory on democracy,.  I should add, however, that Talisse is, in my opinion, a very good thinker and an excellent writer. Besides this book, over the years I've read a number of his scholarly articles and heard him speak in NYC and elsewhere. PPD is definitely worth reading, while those with a Deweyan democracy bent will probably find themselves arguing with him nearly point for point (as Hildebrand pretty much does). On the other hand, the concluding chapter on Sidney Hook is valuable in its own right. As Talisse writes: Hook's life stands as an inspiring image of democratic success; for success consists precisely in the activity of political engagement by means of public inquiry. I haven't got my e-CP available, so I can't locate references, but it seems to me that Peirce's view of democracy as I recall it is, if not nearly anti-democratic (I vaguely recall some passages in a letter to Lady Welby), it may at least be closer to H. L. Mencken's:  As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. I doubt that a discussion of PPD would be very valuable, but it might be interesting to at least briefly reflect on Peirce's views of democracy. As I recall,he hasn't much to say about democracy in what's published in the CP and the other writings which have been made available to us. Perhaps more will be uncovered in years to come as his complete correspondence is published in W (I probably won't be alive for that as I understand that it will probably be the last or near last volume in W, and at the snail's pace the W is moving. . .)  Meanwhile, can anyone on the list offer some Peirce quotations which might help quickly clarify his views on democracy? I would, of course, hope that if there is some discussion here that we keep to a strictly theoretical discussion, especially in light of the strong feelings generated by the recent American presidential election. Best, Gary R st Philosophy of Democracy Gary Richmond Philosophy and Critical Thinking Communication Studies LaGuardia College of the City University of New York C 745 718 482-5690 ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm . ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . 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