Peirce on Reality, Truth, and the Convergence of Inquiry in the Limit

Ilya Farber Peirce on Reality, Truth, and the Convergence of Inquiry in the Limit1 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. 1. Obtrusive Realism and Projective Realism One way in which Peirce characterizes reality is as the thing that is revealed in the experience of resistance to our will. I'll call this the obtrusive conception of reality, since it involves the obtrusion of some sort of unyielding reality into an otherwise malleable world of consciousness or theory. This formulation of Peirce's directs our attention to one way in which we can establish that there is something — anything — outside of and independent of Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Summer, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 3 542 Ilya Farber ourselves.3 The story can be told in either of two directions, as the discovery of unreality in the experience of error or as the discovery of reality in the experience of resistance to one's will: And what do we mean by the real? It is a conception which we must first have had when we discovered that there was an unreal, an illusion; that is, when we first corrected ourselves. Now the distinction for which alone this fact logically called, was between an ens relative to private inward determinations, to the negations belonging to idiosyncrasy, and an ens such as would stand in the long run. "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" (1868), EPl 52 Where is the real, the thing independent of how we think it, to be found? There must be such a thing, for we find our opinions constrained; there is something, therefore, which influences our thoughts, and is not created by them. "Review of Fraser's The Works of George Berkeley" (1871), EPl 88 It is the same when we exert ourselves against outer resistance; except for that resistance we should not have anything upon which to exercise strength. This sense of acting and of being acted upon, which is our sense of the reality of things, — both of outward things and of ourselves, — may be called the sense of Reaction, [emphasis added] "What is a Sign?" (MS., 1894), EP2 4-5 Together, such experiences provide grounds for talking about an external reality, but only in a limited sense that is reminiscent of Kant's noumenal realm: if reality emerges only as a constraint or condition on our experience, then we can't say anything about its nature as it stands apart from us. Thus, while this account avoids both traditional...