Peirce on reality, truth, and the convergence of inquiry in the limit

Abstract

It's surprisingly difficult to say just how Charles Peirce understands the concept of reality. He seems to have somewhere between two and four ideas which he routinely discusses under that one heading, and these ideas are not always clearly distinguished. Perhaps most famously, he identifies the real as that which is independent of what any individual thinks about it; but he also describes it as something that we find in our experience, as a type of cognition, and as the object of inquiry sometimes all in the same passage.2 It is clear that Peirce wants to explicate a sense of reality that captures at least part of the standard intuitive meaning of the term, and that he wants to define it by reference to the role it plays in our experience; beyond this, however, things get murky. In this essay I will identify two central strands in Peirce's thought on reality, both of which seem to recur throughout the entirety of his career. On the surface the two conceptions look very different, though not necessarily incompatible; this may be because they are intended to capture different aspects of the pretheoretic distinction between the real and the unreal. The first half of this discussion will thus be devoted to figuring out what Peirce intends in each account and to determining how far they go toward providing a coherent concept of reality. In the second half, I will present a novel set of problems relating to Peirce's assumption that inquiry must ultimately converge on true beliefs about reality, and will suggest a modification to his approach that resolves at least some of these problems while increasing the relevance of his abstract model to the case of finite human science.