Pragmatist thinkers claim that we must create a sort of “superstructure” made up of values, many of which are useful instruments within the cognitive project. This explains why, for instance, economic considerations are certainly important in the conduct of our cognitive affairs. However, when it comes to conducting our social and political affairs, these values, which can always be tested pragmatically, are also underdeterminate. In other words, they do not lead to a specific and exact resolution of the issues at stake, but leave rather room for alternative and competing ways of conducting our inter-personal affairs. This means that abstract rationality alone is insufficient to enforce a consensus on social issues, and on a larger scale, ideological and political issues as well.
Nicholas Rescher, for example, deems the idea that social harmony must be predicated in consensus to be both dangerous and misleading. Rather, he argues that an essential problem of our time is the creation of political and social institutions that enable people to live together in peaceful and productive ways, despite the presence of not eliminable disagreements about theoretical and practical issues. These remarks, in turn, strictly recall the practical impossibility of settling philosophical disputes by having recourse to abstract and aprioristic principles.
Things being so, all theories of idealized consensus present us with serious setbacks. This is the case, for instance, with Charles S. Peirce. In our day the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has in a way revived these Peircean insights, putting forward an influential theory to the effect that consensus indeed plays a key role in human praxis, so that the primary task of philosophy is to foster it by eliminating the disagreement which we constantly have to face in the course of our daily life. Rescher opposes both Peirce’s eschatological view and Habermas’ regulative and idealized one. To all those authors who contend that science, for example, is a typically consensus-seeking enterprise, he replies that, even in this context, consensus remains an aspiration. Agreement is usually achieved on issues of concrete particularity, but never extends to broader, theoretical domains, because controversy is all too common in the scientific domain.