:Peirce on Inference: Validity, Strength, and the Community of Inquirers

In this essay, I reflect on the way planning concepts, techniques, instruments and the general idea of ‘planning’ itself flow from one place to another, particularly in the context of the transnational flow of planning ideas. In the past, our conception of such flows was underpinned by linear and singular models of development pathways – the ‘modernization’ myth. This rendered them apparently benign and positive contributions to ‘development’. Today, such concepts have been replaced by a recognition of contingency and complexity, which highlights the particular histories and challenges of localities in different parts of the world, and the damaging consequences when external ideas about planning and development are planted upon specific histories and geographies. This refocusing in turn raises questions about any general meaning of ‘planning’ as a universal good technology for complex urbanized societies. The paper reviews these shifts in conception, and then considers firstly how, as planning academics and practitioners, we should build narratives around particular ‘travelling’ planning ideas, to help critical learning in places where such ideas get to ‘land’. Secondly, I suggest how the idea of ‘planning’ itself might be approached, as a general concept contingently evolving through the experiences and debates we engage in as a ‘community of inquirers’ through which we compose and construct our field of interest. In such a formulation, the general idea of planning is lodged in the tradition of experience, innovation, debate and critique which have accumulated around the practices of managing co-existence in complex urbanized societies.

I write this short essay in response to Peirce, as a feminist, pragmatist, and cultural studies scholar, in the hope that it will help to bring feminism and pragmatism together. I suggest that Peirce offers marginalized and colonized people a way to argue for the importance of their input, with his theory of fallibilism, even if he still claims a position of privilege. He also offers assistance through his concept of “a community of inquirers.” It is curious that Peirce’s definition of a university argues for a split between theory and practice that his earlier work sought to heal. Peirce opened a door to help diverse scholars be able to enter the university, and find a way to address issues of power, with his youthful connecting of theory to practice, that his more senior position draws our attention away from and seeks to hold off. Fortunately, it is too late. Peirce’s youthful pragmatism has been developed in important ways by other scholars and now serves as an example of a way to do philosophy that does connect theory to practice and does seek to address real problems in diverse peoples lives, and help to find solutions that effect change.

This chapter reviews the influence of pragmatism in democratic theory with regard to epistemic aspects of democracy. To respond to these concerns, most Deweyan pragmatists in contemporary democratic theory have weakened or abandoned the arduous communal and perfectionist elements of John Dewey’s view and instead focused more on democracy as collective inquiry and problem-solving. Indeed, the idea that democracy is best understood as a community of inquirers has injected liberal theory and generated a cluster of accounts under the label “pragmatist political liberalism,” which draws together strands from pragmatism, John Rawls’ political liberalism, and epistemic democracy. As Matthew Festenstein points out, there are several shared commitments between pragmatism and political realism, such as to the primacy of practice, to the focus on agency, and to the doubts about “antecedent a priori criteria” for success external to practice, experience and social learning.

Joseph Margolis’ philosophical work is both sanguine and fair. It is sanguine because much of it captures the inherent worth and dignity of the human condition. This includes aesthetics, anthropological diversity and history, the diversity of cognitive orientations and objectivity without foundations. Margolis embraces science and naturalism without reductionism. His pragmatism, though, is rooted more in James’ perspectivism, his local nice adaptation, and his relativism than that of Peirce and Dewey and their sense of science and the community of inquirers. Margolis’ strength is his attempt to reconcile positions and his fairness towards others as he tries to wedge his pragmatist position amid others (e.g. Quine, Davidson, Rorty, Brandom). But he celebrates the subjective stance of James, and downplayed the communal sense of Peirce and Dewey so vital to epistemic advances.

Review of Pierluigi Barrotta, Scientists, Democracy and Society. A Community of Inquirers, Springer, London 2018, pp. 180.

This chapter introduces guiding principles grounded in an Interactional Ethnographic (IE) logic-of-inquiry for mapping and transcribing the developing languaculture of a bilingual Fifth-grade class. By making transparent how the ethnographer constructed a logic-in-use to support her in analyzing and (re)presenting what the teacher proposed to, and constructed with students, within and across three events of the first morning, we create telling cases of an IE logic of analysis. By presenting the ethnographer's analytic logic-in-use for each event, we introduce how she brought together different lenses, each with a particular power of description, to develop understandings of ways in which the teacher engaged participants in initiating a languaculture of this class. The first analytic logic-in-use makes transparent the ethnographer's analytic grammar to record, analyze, and (re)present the actions possible for students to engage with others in the individual-small group event of the morning. The second analytic logic-in-use introduces ways of transcribing how the teacher engaged students discursively in transitioning to a collective activity. The third analytic logic-in-use, introduces how the ethnographer traced phases of a developing event in which the teacher introduced students to ways of learning to think, reason, and take actions as a mathematician within a community of inquirers.

1. Talisse and Aikin argue that pragmatists who take themselves to be pluralists are making a serious mistake. The pluralism in question here is 'deep' pluralism: the view that the persistence of disagreement or conflict is not due to a mistake on someone's part or to human frailty, but is due to the world. I think that Tallise and Aikin are on to something important here. Those pragmatists who take themselves to be pluralists (James, Dewey, Rorty, for instance)1 do indeed turn their backs on something essential to pragmatism. I shall, that is, agree with Talisse and Aiken that pragmatism and a principled, across-the-board pluralism are in tension. Pragmatists cannot be pluralists who enthusiastically hold that the world makes pluralism inevitable. They ought to follow the founder of the doctrine C.S. Peirce in being unenthusiastic about pluralism. Nonetheless and here I part company with Talisse and Aikin pragmatists also ought to follow Peirce in reconciling themselves to the possibility of pluralism's holding here and there. We shall see that, despite this reluctant attitude towards pluralism, the pragmatist can and must celebrate and encourage the diversity of views. 2. The lever on which the pragmatist's position on pluralism turns is the concept of truth. It is unsurprising that James, Dewey, and Rorty take themselves to be pluralists, as they are constantly tempted by the view that there is no truth only different, equally warranted, accounts of what is the case. Peirce was much more of an objectivist about truth and so it is also unsurprising that he is less keen on pluralism. Peirce argued that a true belief is one which would be indefeasible or one which would stand up to the rigors of inquiry (CP 5.569, 6.485). A true belief is one which is unassailable by doubt; it is a belief which would meet every demand we were to place on it (CP 5.416). On this view, truth is a stable property a belief is either true (indefeasible) or not. And truth is not a matter for some particular community if a belief is indefeasible, it would stand up to whatever could be thrown at it, by any community of inquirers. 3. Talisse and Aikin distinguish between meaning pragmatism and inquiry pragmatism. Meaning pragmatism, they say, is roughly: the meaning of a concept lies in its practical consequences. Conflict or disagreement is to be dissolved, not resolved, as it is often a problem about clarifying meaning. Inquiry pragmatism,

Peirce on Inference: Validity, Strength, and the Community of Inquirers by Richard Atkins (review)

After presenting some parallels between James and Peirce, as regards their views on psychology, truth, ethics, and even realism, some differences between both philosophers are pointed out: whether they favor concrete individuals rather than the community of inquirers, favor life rather than knowledge, take or do not take all aspects of the sceptical challenge seriously, and are committed or not committed to a strong realistic (rather than nominalistic) metaphysics. Such differences, or even oppositions, may have more to do with what they took as decisive in philosophy and, more generally, with their respective conceptions of our ethical priorities.

The point, of course, has to do with interpretive frame. I suppose, too, the point has to do with the ways in which imaginative forms can be addressed within the social studies or any other use of the social sciences in education. The issue is not any longer the tension between qualitative and quantitative. It has to do with vantage point, metaphor, chosen mode of discourse, and community of inquirers. Given the increased awareness of the insufficiencies of positivistic approaches, with their questionable reliance on outdated and value-free protocols, I do not believe there is an either/or when it comes to the treatment of such themes

One of the most powerful but elusive motifs in pragmatist philosophy is the idea that a liberal democracy should be understood as a community of inquirers. This paper offers a critical appraisal of a recent attempt to make sense of this intuition in the context of contemporary political theory, in what may be called pragmatist political liberalism (PPL). Drawing together ideas from Rawlsian political liberalism, epistemic democracy and pragmatism, proponents of PPL argue that the pragmatist conception of inquiry can provide a satisfying interpretation of the idea of justificatory neutrality as it appears in political liberalism. This is contrasted with Dewey's understanding of the epistemic character of democracy, which is viewed as unacceptably sectarian. This paper identifies and criticizes the two principal lines of argument made in support of PPL: the clarification argument and the fixation argument. Neither of these lines of argument, it is argued, passes the test each sets itself. I argue that the latter closes down the epistemic openness in the justification of democracy that is central to pragmatism.

Urban design is a multifaceted and evolving field. However, it does not become multifaceted and evolve by itself. We make it so. The ‘we’ is the community of inquirers and enactors such as academic...

The goal of this article is to expose the structural complexity of citizens’ trust in scientific experts, and to argue for the possibility of a productive cooperation between citizens and scientific experts within a community of inquirers. We firstly distinguish between three different idealized forms of epistemic inequality, with the purpose of shedding light on the distinctive features of the relationship between laypeople and scientific experts. Then, we highlight the multi-layeredness of the layperson-expert trust: though laypeople’s trust in science is of an epistemic kind, we maintain that its grounds are rather deontological and institutional. Finally, we show how the radical epistemic inequality between laypeople and scientific experts does not rule out the possibility of public deliberation on public issues, the latter being conceived of as problems in which scientific and socio-ethical–political components are essentially interwoven.

The logic of worldviews provides a consistent method of comparison between multiple worldviews. The present paper connects the logic of worldviews to important historical and contemporary influences. Beginning with its roots in semiotics, an account of epistemology emerges which is mediated by a belief system. We show that Charles Peirce’s pragmatistic theory of inquiry is the bedrock beneath the logic of worldviews. We formulate it as a generalized version of inquiry with underlying game-theoretic semantics. In this paper, we extend Peirce’s triadic model of signs to cover knowledge mediated by systems of beliefs. Michael Polanyi’s account of personal commitment includes a subsidiary/focal distinction that views theoretical frameworks as tools for interpreting orders of reality through actual practices of research. We also see how a precedent is set by Johan Georg Hamann’s epistemology of belief, recovered by Ludwig Wittgenstein, using reason as an interpretation of God’s speech in nature. We argue that Thomas Kuhn’s theory of inquiry and worldviews (or paradigms) may be fruitfully contrasted with Peirce’s theory, with reasoning by abduction, deduction, and induction occurring within the community of inquirers. The upshot is that although worldviews may be adopted for non-rational reasons, one can meaningfully compare worldviews through a method proposed by Alasdair MacIntyre: the proponent of a theory learns the language of competing theories and uses them as a metatheory to show how one’s own theory may not have the resources to resolve certain problematic situations. Our result is a meta-linguistic falsification in the sense of Peirce’s semiotics and pragmaticism: the competing theory may be used to show that the object theory does not have a strategy at its disposal to interpret the anomalous phenomenon.

Correction: C.S. Peirce on Mathematical Practice: Objectivity and the Community of Inquirers