Pragmatism, Adaptive Management, and Sustainability

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. (Albert Einstein) I would like to propose for discussion a claim that may seem quite surprising: that Charles Sanders Peirce's definition of truth provides a useful analogy, or template, for defining ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainable living’. This claim could never be fully justified in a single paper, of course, so I can only sketch a few elements of the complex case that would have to be made to fully justify it here. My purpose, then, is more to explore some new directions for environmental philosophy, and to provoke discussion of a set of hitherto ignored problems that are relevant to the search for a definition of sustainable living, than to offer definitive answers to the problems posed. Representative versions of Peirce's definition are: ‘Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief’ ( Collected Papers , 5.565) and ‘Truth is the last result to which the following out of the (experimental) method would ultimately carry us’ (5.553). In general, this definition presents a pleasing analogy to searchers for a definition of sustainability because of its ‘forward-looking’ temporal horizon. Exploring this analogy might uncover clues as to how to give a sustainability definition the kind of forward, normative thrust it needs.

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