Abstract

My fellow panelists and I are generally searching for what Robert C. Neville calls a "high road around modernism," a road that leads out of the modernist morass while avoiding the pitfalls of Euro-style postmodernism. We seek a way toward genuine community, and toward the kind of meaningful individualism that can exist in such communities. We stake quite a lot on the Roycean model of community as perhaps the most promising path on this "high road." In the next twenty minutes, I propose to do three things.[1] The first is to outline C. S. Peirce's model of the working scientific community, which he proposed as an alternative to the Cartesian-modernist model of scientific investigation. The second is to identify the ways in which Josiah Royce developed and extended Peirce's original model to apply to other communities--particularly religious communities. Finally, I want to draw attention to some possible problems with such extensions of the basic Peircean model of scientific community