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
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