Defanging Peirce’s Hopeful Monster: Community, Continuity, and the Risks and Rewards of Inquiry

Abstract

conservatism is part of the legacy of the pragmatic tradition’s deep respect for the continuity of inquiry. despite his commitment to open and fallible inquiry, charles sanders Peirce remained his entire life a kind of religious conservative, arguing for a community that would be, in douglas Anderson’s words “conservative in its practice and liberal in its theory.”1 The following argument is largely about Peirce’s career-long struggle to reconcile conservative practice and liberal theory, especially as they impact his philosophy of inquiry. he offers hints at a solution, what i am calling his “hopeful monster,” but remains ambivalent about this strategy, as should we, his contemporary readers. As described below, a hopeful monster is a compelling but maximally risky experimental hypothesis, especially a hypothesis that must be fully embodied by an experimenter in order to be tested against reality. A hopeful monster, in short, is an existential wager on the viability of an untested course of action in vital matters. ultimately, Peirce’s hopeful monster, though designed to insulate the larger community of inquiry from danger, leaves us with an “irrational” process, as defined by Wesley Wildman.2 And so i turn to Wildman’s work as well as elizabeth cooke’s analysis of Peirce’s fallibilism with the hope of locating a more rational, merely “inefficient” process of inquiry into vital matters. The payoff, i argue, is not merely solving a problem internal to Peirce’s corpus. it is also the beginnings of a pragmatic model of inquiry that can cover the continuum of practical and theoretical matters while making sense of both individuals and communities as relevant units of inquiry. This might make Peirce’s hopeful monsters a bit less monstrous.