> On Nov 28, 2016, at 2:57 PM, Gary Richmond <gary.richm...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I prefer to find a value in the 'tension' between bottom-up and top-down > solutions which Clark hinted at. I'm not at all sure what Peirce's > preferences would be in this matter.
As I said Peirce (especially in his mature phase) lived during the rise of Bizmarkian progressivism. While that movement suffered from a lack of humility in terms of what one could control, it also faced a system with little interstate commerce and relatively low technology. The world we live in today is simply radically different in terms of how integrated it is. Peirce may well offer compelling abstract principles. However I’m far from convinced even if we knew his preferences it’d tell us much about how to act today. The world changed too much with the inflection point of WWII decades after Peirce’s death. I think keeping the tension between emergent and top down approaches is important. But far more important is being open to data and testing our solutions. Neither of which is terribly common among politics or activists in particular. There’s lots of confirmation bias and outright dismissal of uncomfortable facts by all sides. That much more than privileging causal directions seems the problem. Or, to put it in Peirce’s terms, we tend to block off inquiry especially when it tends to confirm a preference of the political outgroup. This keeping open inquiry seems to be the greatest value Peirce offers politics and not a popular one (despite a lot of lip service).
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