This article is the second part of a two-part essay generally contending that pragmatism, as epitomized by Charles Peirce's 1905 essay “What Pragmatism Is” (henceforth WPI), is aptly characterized as transcendental philosophy, and that this reading is particularly illuminating with regard to Peirce's much-vexed 1908 essay “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (henceforth NA).1 Part 1 introduced Peirce's metaphysical categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness), characterizing them as capturing, among other things, phenomenological considerations also central for William James's radical empiricism.2 To the extent that Peirce's own approach is thus informed by phenomenological considerations also central for James, Peirce's approach vindicates the idea that the significance of pragmatism depends greatly on what theory of experience is presupposed. In this regard, James and Peirce alike would have us begin by recognizing that the conception of “experience” bequeathed to us by the British empiricists is inadequate.3Part 1 also introduced Peirce's case, in an 1871 essay on the philosophical works of Berkeley, for reconceiving realism; the significance of this must be acknowledged, I contended, if Peirce's challenge to philosophical business as usual is to be grasped.4 Peirce's transcendental orientation is evident in the centrality of his concern with understanding what, in the first place, “real” can intelligibly mean. In this regard, he argues in the essay on Berkeley that modern Anglophone philosophers have long been misled by their unexamined presupposition of nominalist conceptions of reality—conceptions, that is, according to which the mind-independent character of the real consists in its lying altogether outside of mind. Mind, on such views, is excluded from reality just by so defining “real,” which can for nominalists consist only in what is determinately locatable in space. Peirce argues that reality's independence of mind is not intelligibly conceivable that way; the real cannot be conceived as independent of mind, per se, although it must be acknowledged, he wrote in 1871, as independent of “how you or I, or any number of men think.”5 This distinction—that between mind, per se, and any number of particular minds—is central to Peirce's case for reconceiving realism, and Peirce's guiding insight, I argued in part 1, is that the distinction is best explicated not in spatial but in temporal terms. The same insight will find expression as his basic answer to the title question of WPI: Pragmaticism (to adopt herewith Peirce's willfully ungainly term) is the view that “the rational meaning of every proposition lies in the future.”6That the rational meaning—for Peirce the real meaning—of any concept or claim is thus to be understood as constitutively implicating an indefinite future is evident, Peirce saw, in the very idea of purposeful activity. As he writes in WPI, “quite the most striking feature” of Pragmaticism is “its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose.”7 To act purposefully is to act with an eye towards realizing some envisaged aim, an aim not yet actual; to that extent, anything taken as significant is, ipso facto, taken as having some conceivable bearing on a partly indefinite future. Moreover, it is only as somehow “taken” that anything given to experience can show up as practically significant.8 This idea—that the phenomenologically given is epistemically or otherwise significant only as taken—is a transcendental idea. In this regard, part 1 elaborated my understanding of “transcendental philosophy,” emphasizing what kinds of conclusions can reasonably be drawn based on that approach.9 I particularly urged that transcendental philosophy is not to be understood as proposing alternative claims of the sort typical of philosophical business as usual; rather, its contribution consists only in its identifying constraints on theoretical reason—constraints, pragmatists can emphasize, imposed by the fact that theoretical understanding can in the first place result only from real exercises of practical reason. Epitomizing the contribution I thus take to be made by transcendental philosophy, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason draws, we saw in part 1, a veritably pragmatist conclusion: “All interest is ultimately practical and even that of speculative reason is only conditional and is complete in practical use alone.”10 Theoretical understanding is unintelligible if it is inconsistent with the occurrence of the very practices that yield it; “one cannot,” Kant thus argued, “require pure practical reason to be subordinate to speculative reason and so reverse the order.”11It now remains for us to see what it looks like for Peirce himself to develop arguments to that effect; on my reading, just such arguments are central both to WPI and to the NA. For a variety of reasons, this is helpfully brought into view by first attending briefly to the NA, particularly with an eye towards aspects of that essay often found problematic; just such aspects turn out, I suggest, to make sense on a transcendental reading of Peirce. We begin, then, by introducing Peirce's NA.The advantages of a transcendental reading of Peirce are particularly evident in reading the NA, a notoriously elusive essay that leaves many readers wondering just what the supposed “argument” is. Such was the response of Hibbert Journal editor L. P. Jacks, who upon receiving Peirce's initial submission asked that Peirce add a brief summary—“in order,” Jacks diplomatically said, “to forestall careless cavillers who might say, ‘what, then, precisely, is your neglected argument?’”12 In response, Peirce sent two brief “additaments” (as he called them), apparently intending that Jacks would pick out (as Peirce wrote in correspondence) “a small passage that was neither egotistical nor offensive to anybody”; Peirce was surprised, though, when the article appeared in print including the complete text only of his second additament, which was printed, without any header, continuously with the end of the text Peirce had first submitted (albeit separated by a blank line).13 Comprising five numbered sections, the NA as first submitted had rather abruptly ended with a fifth section of just three paragraphs, which conclude by introducing the idea that a full assessment of the NA would amount to taking one's “stand upon Pragmaticism.” The editorial decision to include Peirce's second additament immediately following this makes sense insofar as the second additament begins by picking up just that thought: “Since I have employed the word Pragmaticism . . . ”14 As it appeared in print, then, the text of Peirce's second additament made sense as seamlessly continuing the article Peirce had first submitted.Or so it seems. Continuing with the additament that concludes the NA as printed in the Hibbert Journal, one shortly encounters reference to a “third argument, enclosing and defending the other two”; it is only in Peirce's first additament, though, that he refers to the three arguments he thus has in mind, and without that reference it is hard to make sense of his now referring to a third.15 If one consults the first additament, however, it becomes evident that the two additaments, taken together, do actually suggest an outline of the NA's overall structure.16 The two additaments suggest this by way of dilating on the idea Peirce had introduced (and left notably underdeveloped) in the three-paragraph fifth section that abruptly concludes the NA as first submitted by Peirce. In these few paragraphs, Peirce imagines how the NA's proposal “is likely to be esteemed by three types of men”—one “of small instruction with corresponding natural breadth,” one “inflated with current notions of logic, but prodigiously informed about the N.A.,” and one “a trained man of science.”17 While the ideas Peirce meant to suggest with reference to these three types are barely sketched in the paragraphs that originally concluded the fifth section, the additaments elaborate by suggesting how each of the NA's various sections advances considerations relevant to one or the other of these three types of person. The first additament begins, then, by thus announcing what Peirce takes himself to have presented in the NA as originally submitted: “A nest of three arguments for the Reality of God has now been sketched . . . ”18Peirce's idea is that specific sections of the NA respectively correspond to the approaches appropriate for each of the three types of student; the first additament draws the correlations involved for all three types, and the second additament particularly elaborates on the third.19 It seems to me the two additaments thus suggest the following outline of the overall structure of the NA, numbered (except for the second item, “I.i”) according to Peirce's own section numbers: I.Beginning with terminological stipulations, the long first section of the NA comprises the reflections Peirce will sketch as exemplifying the mood of “Musement” that he takes as conducive to nurturing the “argument” he has in mind: “that entirely honest, sincere, and unaffected, because unprepense, meditation upon the idea of God into which the Play of Musement will inevitably sooner or later lead.”20I.i.The first section rather abruptly ends by introducing a new line of argument, presumably the second of the three identified in the first additament. According to the first additament, the second argument—presumably most apt to be esteemed by Peirce's second kind of person (one “inflated with current notions of logic”)—aims at “showing that the humble argument is the natural fruit of free meditation.”21 That makes sense, I think, as characterizing the argument opaquely suggested at the end of the first section, although it seems Peirce may also have it in mind that section II advances the second argument. In any case, I will find it apt to elaborate the argument opaquely suggested at the end of the first section only after more of the whole NA has been brought into view—in particular, when we see that section IV concludes with much the same argument.II.Comprising just two paragraphs, this brief section starts by considering what distinguishes theism from other “hypotheses.” It is not entirely clear to me how this dovetails with the aforementioned argument, but this section is salient, for my purposes, for a revealing passage apropos of Peirce's diachronic conception of belief—one that is tellingly omitted, we will shortly see, from Richard Atkins's quotation from this section. Sections I–II complete what the additaments refer to as “the humble argument” that Peirce chiefly aims to recover.III–IV.Here Peirce argues for (he says) the “logicality” of what has been presented in the preceding sections—sections III–IV thus provide “argumentation” in support of the “humble argument.” Peirce's second-order case for the “logicality” of the latter chiefly involves, I take it, the transcendental argument that is also central to the argument of WPI; in NA III–IV, though, that line of argument is recast so as to emphasize the perspective of practical reason.V.Consisting in just three paragraphs, the last section of the original essay abruptly concludes by introducing the aforementioned three types of persons, cursorily suggesting in conclusion that the case made in the NA amounts to the best case for Pragmaticism.As noted above, the NA appeared in 1908 without the first additament (source of the foregoing outline), instead concluding only with the second additament's emphasis on Pragmaticism as a realist view; but despite the NA's avowedly Pragmaticist bent, the editors of the Peirce Edition Project comment that whether the NA is “an elaboration of or an offense against pragmaticism is an unsettled question.”22 It should be acknowledged, in this regard, that notwithstanding Peirce's attempt at clarifying matters in the additaments we have been scouting, many if not most readers of the NA have nonetheless found it unclear just how we are to make sense of it. Diana Heney likely speaks for many when she wonders whether the NA “deserves the amount of textual spadework and interpretive legwork required to make it plausible.”23 In a review of Richard Atkins's Peirce and the Conduct of Life, Heney adds that she is “inclined to say of [the NA] what Atkins says of Peirce's earlier effort in philosophy of religion, the 1892 ‘Evolutionary Love’: ‘I have no interest here in defending that essay.’”24 Atkins himself does indeed disparage Peirce's “Evolutionary Love”—continuing the sentence quoted by Heney, Atkins opines that “there can be little doubt [that essay] was written in the thralls of a religious fervor”25—but he ventures, in Peirce and the Conduct of Life, to find a plausible way of reading the NA. As I noted at the outset of part 1, the significance of a transcendental reading of the NA can be brought clearly into relief as against Atkins's interpretation, and it is therefore worthwhile for us to begin with that.Redolent of contemporary Anglophone philosophy of religion, Atkins's reading is focused by epistemological questions, enabling (Atkins says) “a much more charitable reading” of the NA than is otherwise plausible.26 Insofar as the NA is read, he says, as “arguing for the truth of the belief that God is real,” it must be concluded that Peirce's argument “fails miserably”; the NA's case is more promising, Atkins proposes, if taken not as aiming to show that belief in God's reality is true, but rather to show the “rational acceptability of belief in God's reality.”27 Read thus, Peirce's approach will have affinities with the “reformed epistemology” of William Alston, whose book Perceiving God (1991) influentially challenged positivist critics of theism by arguing that the reliability even of perceptual awareness cannot finally be demonstrated without epistemic circularity.28 Alston contends that when it comes to the best epistemic status achievable even for perceptual beliefs, it thus behooves us to think “in terms of epistemic justification, rather than in terms of knowledge.”29 Defeasible justification turns out to be the best practically achievable epistemic status, and to that extent, Alston argues, questions about the epistemic status claimed for certain religious experiences may be on the same footing as ordinary perceptual experience. On Atkins's reading of the NA, Peirce advances what Atkins calls a “strategy of exculpation” similar to Alston's, and for Atkins, too, the strategy's cogency depends on strictly delimiting its epistemic aims; the way to a charitable reading of Peirce's much-vexed essay, for Atkins, is thus to take Peirce not as arguing (despite the NA's titular concern) for the reality of God, but rather as addressing “the question of when it is rationally acceptable to believe in God's reality.”30The questions chiefly at issue for the NA, according to Atkins's reading, thus concern “when it is rationally acceptable to adopt the conclusions of abductions and when it is rationally acceptable to believe perceptual judgments.”31 Atkins contends that perceptual judgments, for Peirce, are themselves finally to be understood as “conclusions of abductions,” so those may amount to one question.32 Whether or not that is right,33 Atkins is surely right that abduction is centrally at issue in the NA—although Peirce refers to this in the NA as retroduction, and that is as I will henceforth say (with quotations from Atkins altered accordingly). Retroduction, Peirce says by way of introducing the idea in the NA, is “reasoning from consequent to antecedent,”34 more commonly referred to as inference to the best explanation; how, precisely, are we to understand the epistemic significance of this?On Atkins's reading, that must be an epistemological question: “Under what conditions is it rationally acceptable to adopt the conclusion of [a retroductive] inference?”35 In light of Atkins's putatively charitable reading of the basic aims of the NA, this amounts to the question whether beliefs formed by retroduction are reasonably taken (not as true but) as justifiably held. Insofar as Peirce holds that defeasible justification is the only practically achievable epistemic status, it makes sense thus to emphasize that Peirce takes his bearings from the conceptual priority of justification—that whether a belief is justified would be, for him, the right way into the issue. Nonetheless, Atkins's focal emphasis on epistemological questions has the effect of obscuring the point that is, I take it, most salient for Peirce; among the upshots of Peirce's arguments in the NA is precisely to refuse the primacy of epistemological questions, and the NA's main question regarding retroduction is, accordingly, more basic. Peirce himself evidently considered the NA “an a posteriori, experimental version of the ontological argument.”36 It strikes me that is in much the same ballpark as the characterization I propose: the NA's core argument urges the ineliminable reality of thirdness, which in the NA is epitomized by retroduction itself. It is as epitomizing thirdness that retroduction is salient for the NA, and the real question concerning retroduction is whether it can or should be acknowledged as just intrinsically significant—as irreducibly basic, that is, notwithstanding that it will admit of no explanation.Despite retroduction's salience as epitomizing thirdness, Atkins refers only once to thirdness in his reading of the NA, and this in contending that “nothing in Peirce's ‘A Neglected Argument’ hinges on his peculiar metaphysical or categorial scheme.”37 Given, however, the centrality of Peirce's preoccupation with thirdness, it is prima facie unlikely that retroduction's exemplifying thirdness would be just incidentally significant for the NA. Indeed, Peirce had in a 1903 lecture announced the “urgent pertinence of the question of Thirdness,” arguing on that occasion that philosophers most consequentially differ over “the extent to which they allow elements of Thirdness a place in their theories.”38 In this regard, he urged, pragmatism (as he still called it in 1903) has two chief roles to play: it can “give us an expeditious riddance of all ideas essentially unclear,” and it can help render “distinct” those ideas that are “clear but more or less difficult of apprehension”—and to attend to the latter, Peirce says, just is to take “a satisfactory attitude toward the element of Thirdness.”39 A concern with satisfactorily accounting for thirdness is also, we will see, paramount for the NA.Nevertheless, it makes sense that the significance of thirdness might not clearly show up for an epistemologically focused reading like Atkins's; this is so, I suggest, particularly insofar as such a reading presupposes just the conception of belief that Peirce rejected. Insofar as belief is conceived as something in the first place to be justified, beliefs are effectively conceived as propositional attitudes; integral to Peirce's case for reconceiving realism, however, is a conception of belief, we will see, as essentially intelligible only diachronically. That this is hard to make sense of on Atkins's epistemological framing is evident, I think, in Atkins's dismissively brief consideration of the unconventional sense of the word argument that Peirce stipulates in the opening section of the NA. The NA begins, as noted above, by stipulating the senses of various terms of central significance for the essay's aims, starting with God: “the definable proper name, signifying Ens necessarium; in my belief Really creator of all three Universes of Experience.”40 These terminological preliminaries include a helpful discussion of how “real” is to be distinguished from “actual,” as well as an illuminating characterization of Peirce's idea of thirdness.41 What is presently salient, however, is the last of the terms of art whose sense Peirce thus stipulates at the outset: “An ‘Argument’ is any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief. An ‘Argumentation’ is an Argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premisses.”42This will strike contemporary philosophical readers as infelicitous, since conventional philosophical usage suggests almost the reverse; as Atkins rightly says, “Almost everyone uses the word ‘argument’ in a philosophical context to indicate a line of thought that proceeds on definitely formulated premises.”43 What is salient for present purposes, though, is that Peirce's perhaps infelicitous terminological stipulation is largely irrelevant for Atkins, who is “unconvinced that Peirce even respects this distinction throughout ‘A Neglected Argument’ and its two additaments.”44 Indeed, despite Peirce's announced concern with something other than philosophical business as usual, Atkins finally takes it that “the article itself is an argumentation,” one (to recall Alston) not to the effect that God is real, but rather to the effect that God's reality is justifiably maintained. The core concerns of the NA can be expressed, then, in terms of a familiar sort of epistemological argument that Atkins would thus reconstruct: (1) [Retroduction] is a valid inference form under [certain] conditions . . . (2) Certain lines of thought that lead to belief in God's are [retroductive] inferences that satisfy those conditions. So, (3) belief in God's reality is rationally acceptable.45While it is right that retroduction is centrally at issue in the NA, it seems to me Atkins's characterization misses the basicness of its significance for Peirce. Retroduction, I take it, is salient in the NA as exemplifying thirdness, and on my reading the question at issue is whether it must be acknowledged as irreducibly basic. The principal argument of the NA, I thus take it, is a transcendental argument for the reality of thirdness, epitomized in the NA by retroduction. Given the understanding of Peirce's realism developed in this article's part 1, it is not surprising that retroduction turns out to involve real temporal duration, as does belief. This is relevant, moreover, to the eccentric sense of argument stipulated by Peirce; for retroduction itself, he says in the NA, is “a form of Argument rather than of Argumentation.”46That Atkins is hard-pressed to acknowledge as much is evident, however, in his misleadingly selective quotation from a revealing passage in the NA's brief section II. The NA's first section having evoked instances of the kind of “Musement” that epitomizes the eccentric sense of argument stipulated at the start, Peirce suggests in section II how such trends of reflection give rise to the theistic hypothesis. According to Atkins's selective quotation from this discussion, this is what Peirce says: From what I know of the effects of Musement on myself and others, . . . any normal man . . . will come to be stirred to the depths of his nature by the beauty of the idea and by its august practicality . . . desiring above all things to shape the whole conduct of life and all the springs of action into conformity with that hypothesis . . . [which is] neither more nor less than the state of mind called Believing that proposition.47What is salient here for Atkins is just Peirce's undeniably problematic invocation of “any normal man,” which is, Atkins rightly says, “an empirical claim that may well turn out to be false.”48 Preoccupied with epistemological questions, Atkins further comments only that even if this debatable empirical claim were true, “it would not follow that God is real”; it would show only that “the hypothesis [that] God is real is such that it compels our belief.”49The passage quoted by Atkins looks rather different, though, without Atkins's typographical and other modifications. Focusing only on the last sentence, we find that this is what Peirce says by way of elaborating the idea of “desiring above all things to shape the whole conduct of life” according to a hypothesis: Now to be deliberately and thoroughly prepared to shape one's conduct in conformity with a proposition is neither more nor less than the state of mind called Believing that proposition, however long the conscious classification of it under that head be postponed.50On my reading, the last clause, altogether omitted from Atkins's quotation, is most salient. Peirce here suggests that belief cannot be adequately understood in terms of momentary mental states; that a “belief” could make sense as such however long it goes unidentified as such suggests, indeed, that occurrent propositional attitudes—actual entertainings or avowals of belief—should be acknowledged as phenomenological lagging indicators. Indeed, we here see again that Peirce is oriented by considerations that were central, as well, for James's radical empiricism, which held, we saw in part 1, that phenomenological continuities such as that of reflective awareness with a “subconscious more” are philosophically significant. In such terms, the point I take Peirce to have made here is also made by James, when he contends in Varieties that we must acknowledge the following if we are to make sense of whether or how anyone is moved by an argument: Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result . . . The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.51Although hard to acknowledge in epistemologically conventional terms, the same idea is of central significance not just for the NA, but also for Peirce's considered views on Pragmaticism. Indeed, by way of further elaborating the significance of the clause omitted from Atkins's quotation from NA section II, it behooves us to have a look at Peirce's 1905 essay WPI; as I read it, that essay turns out centrally to involve the same line of argument I will show to be central for the NA. WPI begins, moreover, by saying a great deal on the nature and significance of belief; insofar as belief is at issue in the NA, it behooves us to entertain Peirce's considered views on the subject.Cheryl Misak, we saw in part 1, observes that Peirce long “bemoaned” the ways in which James and others had misrepresented the ideas proposed in 1878’s “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”; the popularizers of “pragmatism,” she says, had failed to see that what Peirce proposed in that essay was really “a semantic principle about the very meaning of our concepts.”52 Endeavoring in 1905 to set the record straight once and for all, Peirce's WPI first christens his own doctrine with the ungainly word pragmaticism, a term “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” like James.53 After a few introductory paragraphs suggesting the extent to which Peirce's approach has been distilled from years of conducting scientific research (“the writer,” Peirce says of his bona fides, “here and in what follows simply exemplifies the experimentalist type”),54 WPI thus crystallizes the idea Peirce took himself to have framed in 1878: “the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life.”55 Continuing, Peirce first elaborates that idea in terms seemingly congenial to the positivism exemplified for us in part 1 by Ayer56: if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it.57Despite his concluding emphasis, though, it is clear that by the “rational purport” of a concept Peirce intends something antithetical to anything that could be in view for psychologistic accounts such as those typical of the British empiricists. Such accounts, Peirce says later in WPI, would explicate meaning in terms of “the phenomenal equivalents of words and general ideas,” whereas Pragmaticism “eliminates their sential element, and endeavors to define the rational purport.”58 That, finally, is why Pragmaticism's orienting focus on practical activity is significant for Peirce: any concept's “rational purport” makes sense as its real meaning just insofar as that is mind-independent (albeit, not on a nominalist understanding of that criterion). To that extent, a realist account of meaning requires some abstract element; “this it finds,” Peirce says, “in the purposive bearing of the word or proposition in question.”59 By way of elaborating that idea, WPI first introduces a number of “preliminary propositions” that “had better be stated” if the significance of his proposal is to be grasped; a lot of significant ground is laid here, and the propositions thus introduced all generally come, Peirce says, “under the vague maxim, ‘Dismiss make-believes.’”60It is particularly make-believe doubts that Peirce would in the first place have philosophers disregard; what is reasonably considered dubitable is just what is practically dubitable. Emphasizing that we do not, in the general course of things, choose what to doubt, Peirce had written in another 1905 essay that “a proposition that could be doubted at will is certainly not believed.”61 Expressing the same idea in WPI, Peirce mockingly asks, “Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt?”62 The question targets the Cartesian “method of doubt,” which figures centrally in the British empiricists’ misbegotten idea that epistemology is first philosophy. That idea, Peirce here suggests, is fundamentally misguided insofar as the certainty that is sought by that method concerns matters that are not, in fact, practically dubitable.63 Doubt is practically significant, for Peirce, only as it