> On Nov 26, 2016, at 2:39 PM, Gary Richmond <[email protected]> wrote: > > Meanwhile, my own sense is that one possible strength of Peirce's theory lies > in his philosophical summum bonum, namely, the notion of our seeking the > 'reasonable in itself'. It follows that--and here one perhaps necessarily > goes beyond a consideration of democracy--when this summum bonum is offered > in consideration, now not of mere science, but of what have been called the > 'wicked problems' confronting humanity and the world, that one might hope for > approaches (if not exactly solutions) which appear reasonable for those > communities of interest hoping to address them.
As I’ve thought more about the comments over the weekend I think I have come to an implication of Peirce’s thought. This isn’t necessarily something Peirce himself considered too much. It would seem that Peirce would be concerned about too strong a central government in that he wants to maximize inquiry and thus possible solutions to a problem rather than a single line of inquiry. This would mean a trust in federalism of a sort. A federalism where each state and ideally each county/city within that state would be free to try solutions to problems. Only after seeing success in other locals would solutions be adopted more widely and then via each state/county. The problem otherwise, from a Peircean perspective, would be the danger of too quickly abandoning common sense (the tried experiential solutions of a community) as well as imposing a single hypothesis on society with no way to really test it well. That is there would be a large danger of abduction not being sufficiently tested in terms of it being the best of possible solutions. I’m not sure if anyone else would agree here. There are of course strong arguments against federalism in preference to a stronger central government. That is the problem of getting solutions implemented when there are countering movements in individual states where particular powers are able to unduly control government. (This was of course the argument of the classic progressives of the Teddy Roosevelt era) That is there will intrinsically be a tension between discovering solutions for a problem and whether the majority or at least powerful want to solve that problem. For an example of this think of the relative difference in state policies in a state like Mississippi versus what we might call a more successful state.
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