In claiming that “the method of our great teacher, Experience” is “a system of teaching by practical jokes,” Peirce’s objective, I argue, is to get us to see the unexpected as cause for neither despair nor nihilism but as an opportunity to strengthen our affinity with the natural world. Peirce’s celebration of the flexibility demanded by the “pedagogic method” employed by “Dame Experience” reinforces the dependence between cultivating a sense of humor and developing fruitful habits of inquiry.

Aristotle famously suggested that we are not only rational, but risible, animals. I find it happily appropriate, then, that the pragmaticism of our American Aristotle, Charles S. Peirce, should provide us with a compelling exploration of this essential connection between our capacity for amusement and our ability to learn from experience. By virtue of both temperament–“personality and pragmatism are more or less of the same kidney”(EP2, 134)–and vocation, Peirce was uniquely qualified to take delight in envisioning “the method of our great teacher, Experience” as “a system of teaching by practical jokes.”(EP2, 154) In this way, he shows us that our failure to achieve lasting certainty is not cause for despair or nihilism but ultimately an occasion to find “saving truth” in our affinity with “the reason operative in experience.”(EP2, 212) Or, so I will argue in this essay.