Robert Lane’s Peirce on Realism and Idealism will without a doubt make a stir among Peirce scholars. Lane’s work is historically thorough and shows great care with the chronology of Peirce’s ideas; he resists treating any single piece or phase of work as the “secret decoder ring” for the entire Peircean oeuvre. He pairs this ecumenical attention to text with an uncommon insistence on metaphysical machinery.

Readers of Peirce will be familiar with his critique of nineteenth-century metaphysics, which he memorably described as “puny, rickety, and scrofulous” (CP 6.6). But those remarks are directed (we might even say, rightly applied) to the speculative metaphysics of the nineteenth century—not metaphysics simpliciter. On Lane’s view, what is neither puny nor rickety is basic realism, the view that “there is a world that is the way it is regardless of whether you, or I, or anyone else believes that it is that way” (Lane 20). While much changes in Peirce’s architectonic between the 1860s and 1910, Lane—to my mind—quite clearly shows that realism in this sense is a going concern. It is a familiar challenge to readers of Peirce to square this realism with his apparent avowals of some form of idealism, and one concern of Lane’s volume is to show the integration of basic realism with basic idealism: the view “that anything real can be represented in ideas, thoughts, cognitions, etc.” (Lane 59–60).

The themes on which Lane is focused—truth and reality, mind and world—are absolutely central to any systematic understanding of Peirce, but this treatment of them feels surprisingly fresh. As Lane demonstrates, Peirce’s basic realism and basic idealism spiral out from “basic” in rich ways. I will comment on two of these spirals, and in each case, raise a question and invite Lane’s response.

First: I am intrigued by Lane’s investigation of Peirce’s late development of the reality of vagues and the gappiness of reality. Those commitments integrate with and extend other features of Peirce’s philosophy, including his tychism and synechism. Tychism is the name Peirce gives to his view that real chance exists in the universe, which dovetails with the gappiness Lane develops in tracing the evolution of deficit indeterminacy in Peirce’s later thought. Synechism is Peirce’s doctrine of the continuity of nature, which intersects with the commitment to the reality of vagues—what would have been, or could yet be, an extension of nature is in some sense real.

Compared to Peirce’s pragmatism, tychism and synechism are a harder sell—precisely because one incurs significant metaphysical commitments in endorsing them. It seems to me that a focus on the pragmatic grade of clarity well qualifies us to be “sheep and goat separators” (NEM 3:851, quoted at Lane 191), and that this is about as much metaphysics as many pragmatists care to practice. But if Lane is right, we must take seriously Peirce’s interest in “limit” cases and the boundary of vagueness between binary options. This is helpful in seeing how Peirce responds to puzzles such as the problem of buried secrets and the liar paradox, but by the time of Peirce’s late scholastic realism, we have traveled a long way from “basic.”

Thus, the question: what everyday practice, or everyday pressure, should push us beyond sheep and goats, beyond basic realism and basic idealism? Is it our lived experience of choice revealing that reality has many gaps that could be filled one way rather than another? Is it a reliance on modal concepts? Is it something else entirely?

Second: the way that Lane unpacks basic realism and basic idealism shows that both involve a commitment to representation as an activity integrated into inquiry itself. This is the crux of the work that I think is of greatest import to readers beyond the Peirce community—for it calls us to consider carefully both the history of pragmatism and its future.

Some pragmatists and neo-pragmatists are dead set against representationalism. Richard Rorty1 and Huw Price2 are perhaps the most obvious examples, but they have plenty of company. Michael Williams goes so far as to say that “the heart of pragmatism is anti-representationalism.”3 This is in jarring contrast with Peirce’s view that we not only pursue truth as the end of inquiry, but we also regard a true proposition as “a representation of the real as it really is” (R655: 30; quoted at Lane 47).

Other pragmatists say a great deal about truth while saying somewhat less about reality. In this camp, Lane most notably picks out Christopher Hookway and Cheryl Misak. Both Hookway and Misak develop a pragmatic elucidation of truth meant, as I see it, to extend Peirce’s insights into contemporary conversations. This is no easy task, given what a beating truth itself takes in the long twentieth century.4

Lane’s focus on metaphysics gives us a different lens: in conceiving inquiry as having both investigative and representationalist aspects, he stresses that attempts to understand truth and to understand reality must march ever in step. He is not alone in this view. Andrew Howat, who we shall hear from later in the symposium, has recently argued that “analytic pragmatists have more work to do in explaining pragmatism’s complex relationship with metaphysics.”5

I myself am tempted to characterize Peirce as a “representationalisht.” He is like a representationalist is some ways, but in others, not so much. This is because reality, which impinges on us whether we like it or not, makes demands of us. While we might say what we like of the rules internal to our so-called language games, there is a world beyond the game.6 This thought is expressed in Peirce’s category of Secondness. While Firstness is the “pure” quality of experiences, Secondness is the way in which we find ourselves “bumping up” against it.7 One way in which we respond to that experiential friction is in representational activity, but representation might be one activity among many available to us.

On Lane’s account, it seems that we are called to represent to the extent that we are engaged in inquiry—while other activities may be available, representation is nonnegotiable. It is the route to the real. As he puts it, “The notion of representation—and in particular of how investigators represent the world in their beliefs—is part of the clearest idea of reality, or at least, it is part of the clearest idea of reality that is currently available to us” (Lane 58).

The question here: what should we make of the apparent chasm between contemporary pragmatism and neo-pragmatism on the one hand and Peirce’s way of being a realist on the other? Is this a chasm between pragmatists and neo-pragmatists on one side, pragmaticists on the other? How can we reconceive representation to preserve the most promising parts of the Peircean program, and to advance it?

I have learned a great deal from reading Lane’s excellent monograph, and look forward to hearing more about what he takes this account of Peirce’s views on truth and reality to offer the would-be Peircean, or would-be pragmatist, finding their way in contemporary philosophy.

Works Cited

Heney, Diana B. 2015. “Reality as Necessary Friction.” Journal of Philosophy 112.9: 504–14.

Howat, Andrew. 2018. “Misak’s Peirce and Pragmatism’s Metaphysical Commitments.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 54.3 (Summer): 378–94.

Misak, Cheryl. 2011. “American Pragmatism and Indispensability Arguments.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47.3 (Summer): 261–73.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–58. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by C. Hartshorne et al. 8 vols. Harvard University Press. Cited as CP plus volume and paragraph number.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1976. New Elements of Mathematics. Edited by Carolyn Eisele. 4 vols. De Gruyter. Cited as NEM plus volume and paragraph number.

Price, Huw. 2011. Naturalism Without Mirrors. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2013. Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism. Cambridge University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press.

Williams, Michael. 2013. “How Pragmatists Can Be Local Expressivists.” In Huw, Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism. Cambridge University Press

Is NEM meant to be Naturalism Without Mirrors? (I don’t see a title with the initials NEM in the references section.)

This commentary addresses the issue in Robert Lane’s excellent new book that is closest to my own heart and research, namely his novel interpretation of Peirce’s remarks on truth (chapter 1). In focusing on this single topic and chapter, I regret my inevitable failure to say more about the book’s overall argument and significance. These require and deserve a great deal of attention from Peirce scholars and metaphysicians in the years to come.

Chapter 1 sets out what Lane calls Peirce’s “dual-aspect” account of truth. The account emerges from two insights about how many scholars, myself included, may have misinterpreted what Peirce is doing in his two most influential and important early papers. The first insight is that Peirce’s novel approach to clarifying truth—by reference to its consequences for investigation—is already implicit in The Fixation of Belief (1877).1 It does not, as many often claim, only appear for the first time in the later How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878). The second insight is that even in the latter paper, Peirce’s primary target in applying the pragmatic maxim is not the concept of truth at all, but rather the concept of reality. That is, when Peirce talks about what Lane calls the investigative aspect of truth, he is doing so with the explicit goal of clarifying the concept of reality. His goal in doing so is partly to establish what Lane calls his basic realism.2 In what follows, I explore the significance of these two insights for our understanding of Peircean Truth (PT).3 In particular, I examine Lane’s provocative claim that PT is, in some sense, a correspondence conception of truth. I then raise some questions and potential objections.

To appreciate the importance and distinctiveness of Lane’s “dual-aspect” interpretation, it will be useful to state briefly how scholars typically formulate Peircean Truth.4 This, in turn, will require a very brief introduction to the pragmatic maxim.5

Peirce’s pragmatic maxim is a rule for the clarification of concepts. The maxim says, roughly, that we achieve the highest grade of clarity about the content of a concept by identifying the practical consequences of its correct application. Claims identifying these consequences will be subjunctive conditionals with consequents in the imperative mood. Such conditionals specify the observable consequences we expect, for experience and action, when the target concept applies.6 I label such claims, following Misak, pragmatic elucidations, to distinguish them from various more familiar forms of reductive analysis.7 Lane believes there are two specific observable consequences that Peirce thinks we should expect from a true proposition—one for investigation and one for representation. Only the first of these is traditionally recognized by most Peirceans.

What Lane calls the “investigative aspect” of the concept of truth is the familiar Peircean claim that “a true belief is one that would be permanently settled in the minds of those who use the method of science” (13). This clearly fits the mold of a pragmatic elucidation—it is readily formulated as a subjunctive conditional: if a belief is true, then expect that it would become permanently settled in the minds of those who investigate it. To use Hookway’s terminology, someone who asserts that truth has an investigative aspect makes a clear experiential commitment—a commitment to experience taking a certain course under certain conditions. Peirceans typically recognize this elucidation as PT’s sole or at least primary aspect. As a result they tend to construe PT as an epistemic conception of truth and thus one that wholly eschews traditional metaphysics, particularly the notions of correspondence or representation.8 Lane, however, believes previous accounts have wrongly left out the representationalist aspect of PT and its connection to Peirce’s realism: the claim that “a true belief is one that represents the real world” (7).

This is where Lane’s view represents a striking and provocative departure from PT as traditionally understood, as well as from the broader pragmatist tradition. Misak, for example, has long argued that PT is in no way a metaphysical conception of truth. For Misak, as for many contemporary pragmatists, precisely what is distinctive about pragmatism and pragmatic elucidations is the way they abjure any employment of metaphysical notions—particularly notions like proposition, correspondence, representation, etc.9

There are two main reasons, I take it, why Misak and other Peirceans typically eschew metaphysics in their formulations of PT. First, they worry that a notion like “correspondence with reality” can, at best, offer us a merely verbal or “nominal” definition of truth (Peirce’s “second grade of clarity”), something all but useless to those of us already perfectly familiar and proficient with the concept.10 If we want the highest (third) grade of clarity about truth, then concepts such as representation and correspondence can only cause further confusion, on this line of thought. A metaphysical or correspondence conception of truth, Misak often says, looks liable to amount to one word being “defined by other words, and they by still others, without any real conception being reached (CP 5.423, 1905).”11 Second, most scholars take pragmatism to be, at least in part, a critique of metaphysical realism. To the extent that correspondence conceptions of truth seem associated with such realism, Lane’s view is bound to be a tough sell. For example, Misak often argues that Peirce (at least in his best moments)12 eschews the notions of correspondence and representation precisely because they come with metaphysical baggage at odds with his naturalism.

In the later part of his book, Lane makes an excellent case for the claim that PT can incorporate a correspondence element and with it a form of “basic realism,” without this either requiring or entailing an objectionable or non-naturalistic metaphysics of the sort Peirce might label “ontological gibberish.”13 However, the ultimate success of that case depends, I think, on whether Lane can show that the representationalist aspect of PT is genuinely a pragmatic elucidation of truth and not some kind of reductive or essentialist analysis. If the investigative aspect of truth and the metaphysical views associated with it are not clearly products of applying the pragmatic maxim (and thus of Peirce’s distinctive approach to philosophical analysis), then I suspect many Peirceans may remain reluctant to embrace them, regardless of their independent plausibility.14 Thus, in what follows, I expand and press upon the first reason.

The primary question facing Lane, I think, is this one—how can correspondence between a proposition and some portion of reality be understood as a practical consequence of a proposition’s being true? Chris Hookway writes that “pragmatic clarifications of concepts and propositions are best seen as accounts of the (experiential) commitments we incur when we assert or judge the proposition in question.”15 This provides a different way to frame my question: what sort of experiential commitment is a claim like “proposition p corresponds with reality”?

Lane’s answer to this question, if I understand him correctly, is that the practical dimension of correspondence takes the form of a specific semiotic relationship. Lane cites Peirce’s description of this relationship: “A proposition has a subject (or set of subjects) and a predicate. The subject is a sign; the predicate is a sign; and the proposition is a sign that the predicate is a sign of that of which the subject is a sign. If it be so, it is true” (CP 5.553, 1906, cited on p. 29). My concern about this answer is that it remains unclear how it amounts to a pragmatic elucidation of truth. My uncertainty has two main sources. I shall conclude by identifying them and inviting Prof. Lane to comment on them.

First, I take it that the semiotic relationship identified above sounds distinctly theoretical, rather than practical (it looks like part of Peirce’s elaborate theory of signs).16 How does a sign’s being such that its “predicate is a sign of that of which the subject is a sign” inherently involve experience and action, in the sense seemingly required by the pragmatic maxim? How can the representationalist aspect be framed as a subjunctive conditional with a consequent in the imperative mood? Or to put the question, again, in Hookway’s terms—to what specific observable or experiential consequences, beyond the investigative aspect, do I commit myself when I say p is true?

It could be, of course, that the right answers to these questions will depend on the content of the proposition in question, so that there is no need for Lane to offer us a way to spell out the practical dimension of correspondence in abstraction from the target proposition. Yet, if that is true, then what does the explanatory work here would not be the representationalist aspect, but rather the practical content of the proposition we are calling true (that is, we would derive the relevant experiential consequences from p’s pragmatic meaning, not from that of the concept of truth). Another way to frame the issue then, might be to ask—what, are we really adding to the pragmatic meaning of p when we say that it is true, other than the claim that p would be believed by those who investigated it? It is clear that we are adding that a certain semiotic relationship exists. But how are semiotic relationships observable or experiential, in the required sense?

Second, Lane holds that in How to Make Our Ideas Clear Peirce sets out to apply the maxim to the concept of reality. In doing so he finds he must first clarify the concept of truth, since, in the end, his verdict is that to be real is to be the object of a true opinion (this is the third grade of clarity about the concept of reality, on Lane’s interpretation). This suggests that the concept of truth is explanatorily prior to the concept of reality, in the following sense—grasping the pragmatic meaning of reality requires first grasping the pragmatic meaning of truth. Yet the dual-aspect theory of truth seems to suggest that the opposite is also true. That is, when we set out to clarify the concept of truth using the pragmatic maxim, we discover “dual-aspects” at the third grade of clarity. One aspect merely makes reference to investigation (belief, the method of science, etc.) and thus to familiar epistemic and practical phenomena. The other aspect, however, according to Lane, makes reference to representation (of reality). This suggests that the concept of reality is explanatorily prior to the concept of truth, in the following sense—grasping the pragmatic meaning of truth requires first grasping the pragmatic meaning of reality.

This suggests that there is a special sort of mutual- or inter-dependency that exists between the concepts of truth and reality. In one sense, this is good news for Lane. It speaks in favor of his view that concepts like reality and representation cannot be separated from the concept of truth and against Misak’s claim that the opposite is true. Yet it also raises an interesting and potentially problematic issue—what should we say when complete clarity about the content of one concept seemingly requires complete clarity about the concept of another and vice versa? Isn’t this circularity potentially vicious in the following sense—it seems to rule out the possibility of someone unfamiliar with both concepts ever being able to grasp either of them (because to master one, they must master the other, but mastering the other, requires mastering the first)?

In summary, while I find it eminently plausible that the dual-aspect version of PT would commit us to nothing more than Peirce’s pragmatist-friendly basic realism (and as Lane nicely argues later in the book, to his basic idealism as well), I have not yet fully grasped how both aspects are truly practical in the sense seemingly required by the pragmatic maxim. It is likely my confusion and hesitance is merely a symptom of my own incomplete understanding of both Lane and Peirce himself, so I look forward to learning from this discussion, and from Lane’s ongoing outstanding scholarship on the metaphysical aspects of Peirce’s pragmatism.

Works Cited

Note: Passages appearing in the Collected Papers are cited in the format “CP n.m; year,” where n is the volume number, m the paragraph number, and the year is that of the quoted text.

Aikin, Scott F., and Robert B. Talisse. Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Nature of Philosophy. Routledge, 2017.

Almeder, Robert. “Peirce on Meaning.” Synthese 41.1 (1979) 1–24.

Hookway, Christopher. The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Lane, Robert. Peirce on Realism and Idealism. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Misak, Cheryl. Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Oxford University Press, 2016.

———. Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth. Expanded paperback ed. Oxford Philosophical Monographs. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 vols. Ed. Charles Hartshorne et al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–58.

Short, Thomas Lloyd. Peirce’s Theory of Signs. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Lane arms himself with strong textual evidence and aligns himself with good company in emphasizing the role of “a genealogy of the idea of truth, an account of how that idea has developed over the course of human inquiry” in “The Fixation of Belief” (13). Prior to reading Lane, I suppose that I would have verbally acknowledged the importance of the genealogical argument, even if I didn’t quite know what to do with it. But I took myself to understand the argument, if not its exact role. Lane advances the discussion so far that I am now productively puzzled anew about how “Fixation” works (especially about how it works with its intimate companion “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”).

Lane’s denial of the extremely common claim that “Fixation” and “How to” combine to yield a conception of truth as clarified by the pragmatic maxim looms large in his interpretation and in my puzzlement. The essentials of Peirce’s conception of truth, Lane argues, result from “Fixation’s” genealogy; they inform the deployment of the pragmatic maxim in “How to” rather than resulting from that deployment. The tenacious believer, says Lane, lacks “anything like an idea of what Peirce calls truth . . . the closest he can come to such an idea is just the idea of what he currently believes” (15). Lane pronounces himself less interested in Peirce’s argument that tenacity will not work than in the lessons to be learned from its failure (15n5). For this reason, the unfolding or building up of the concept of truth proceeds quite briskly.1 The weaknesses of tenacity reveal that a successful conception of settled belief will have to be public. The method of authority incorporates a publicity condition into the notion of a permanently settled belief and hence of truth, but fails because it allows beliefs to be formed accidentally and capriciously. We thus add to our conception of truth that beliefs must be settled impersonally; their content must be discovered, not decided by anyone. Only when the a priori method, which incorporates the need for impersonality and consistency but which lacks the needed ingredient of an external permanency, gives way to the method of science have we “finally arrived at the idea of truth” (21). The essentials of truth, viz. its representational aspect and its investigative aspect, its links to reality on the one hand and to belief on the other, are thus in place before the pragmatic maxim rears its influential head.

I accept Lane’s conclusions that Peirce’s conception of truth figures more as a premise than as a conclusion in “How to” and that this conception of truth does not compete with correspondence theories (at least as such). But I’d like to understand more clearly than I do how the argument of “Fixation” now works. Can the tenacious, authoritarian, and a priori believers be as clueless about truth as Lane needs them to be while still playing their needed roles in the genealogy?

Lane has at his disposal a bevy of passages, both from the Illustrations and from later reflections on those works, indicating profound flaws in the conceptions of truth held by followers of the prescientific methods. The tenacious believer “can use the word truth only to emphasize the expression of his determination to hold on to his choice [of belief]” (W3 272, 1878). A retrospective characterization of “Fixation” has it starting from the satisfactoriness of settled belief and then showing “how the conception of truth gradually develops from that principle under the action of experience; beginning with willful belief, or self-mendacity, the most degraded of all intellectual conditions” (CP 5.564, 1906). But I find the textual evidence as a whole more vexing than Lane apparently does. There is the well-known remark in “Fixation” that “we think each of our beliefs to be true, and indeed, it is mere tautology to say so” (W3 248, 1877). Where there is truth talk, there are platitudes about truth, and since those are platitudes about truth it will not be easy to deny them of prescientific believers. Peirce’s free-trade-loving friend, for instance, implicitly relies on logical platitudes about truth when trying to prevent him from reading a tract defending protectionism (W3 249, 1877). Lane himself suggests that when his six-year-old niece insists that she’s telling the truth, she manifests a verbal understanding of truth that he appears to deny to the tenacious or authoritarian believer (see p. 46). Interesting issues arise here about realism and the pedagogical function of Peirce’s thought experiments involving prescientific believers. Finally, how can the proponent of willful belief be guilty of “self-mendacity” unless she has some meaningful access to aspects of truth about which she misleads herself? Space does not permit a detailed engagement with the many relevant passages Lane musters on behalf of his position. But I think textual evidence can also be brought to bear in favor of such of Migotti’s remarks as that “it is in fact necessary that the tenacious believer be credited with some grasp of the difference between p’s being true and p’s being believed by him. Otherwise it is hard to see how he could find any use for the word ‘true’ even as an ‘expression of his determination to hold on to his choice [of belief]’” (Migotti, p. 85). Does anything in Lane’s argument require him to deny that prescientific believers possess the concept of truth rather than agreeing with Migotti that they suffer from “a tension between verbal and epistemic commitments or practices”? (Migotti, p. 87).

I next hope to help Lane handle an apparent tension between his representationalist reading of Peirce on truth and some Peircean remarks that border on the Jamesian. To his credit, Lane confronts himself with passages in which Peirce says that truth virtually consists in beliefs being such that they conduce to the goals of believers. He handles such passages by reading the Jamesian element out of the record. The relevant purposes, Lane suggests, involve the attainment of permanently settled beliefs or the embodiment of concrete reasonableness.2 I don’t find this a plausible surface reading of some of the relevant passages (e.g., the suggestion that belief in true propositions would “lead us to such conduct as would tend to satisfy the desires we should then have” [CP 5.375, 1903]). But I also don’t find it necessary. I think that Peirce can incorporate this side of James via a kind of “go big or go home” strategy. True beliefs need only to “tend to” satisfy our desires, and “each of us is an insurance company” (W2 270, 1869). If we interpret Peirce as referring to all of our possible plans and projects in any circumstances in which we might find ourselves, the Jamesian-sounding statements emerge as defensible pragmatic clarifications of Peircean truth.

Along similar lines, I find myself dissatisfied with Lane’s discussion of Peirce on truth and satisfaction. Lane again confronts passages that might suggest an excessively Jamesian interpretation, like “a state of satisfaction, is all that Truth, or the aim of inquiry, consists in” (EP2 449, 1908). Lane suggests that “a true belief is the satisfying state of mind that practitioners of the method of science will experience if they apply that method until no further application will cause any change in what they believe” (35–36). But the next passage that Lane quotes in support of his anti-Jamesian interpretation makes mischief for his own reading as well. “Fixation,” Peirce says, “is occupied with showing that, if Truth consists in satisfaction it cannot be any actual satisfaction, but must be the satisfaction which would ultimately be found if the inquiry were pushed to its ultimate and indefeasible issue” (EP2 449–450, 1908). The satisfaction, then, is not one that will actually be experienced by any actual believers. Lane also quotes Haack approvingly: “Since truth is the opinion on which the scientific method will eventually settle, and since the scientific method is constrained by reality, truth is correspondence with reality. It also follows that truth is satisfactory to believe, in the sense that it is stable, safe from the disturbance of doubt” (Haack 1978, p. 97). I entirely agree with Haack and Lane that Peirce’s construal of truth in terms of satisfaction constitutes no threat to his representationalism/realism. But this way of developing the point seems to me importantly misleading. The formulations from Haack and Lane quoted above suggest that believing the truth (which actual believers actually do all the time) is especially satisfactory, especially stable, or especially satisfactory-because stable. And claims like that have been put under significant pressure in recent years.3 True beliefs and even knowledge can be undermined in rational as well as arational ways, and it is at best a contingent matter if true beliefs provide actual inquirers any valuable security or tether to reality. Peirceans need to attend to actual as well as to ideal settledness of opinion.

Any connection between these worries and Lane’s major conclusions is admittedly tenuous. Lane, like most writers more concerned with truth than with inquiry, can seem to the epistemologically inclined among us to be rather sanguine about inquiry. This manifests itself in characterizations of the argument against the prescientific methods, for instance. Lane writes that the method of authority “will not succeed in settling every belief of every person” (16). Indeed not. Neither will the method of science. As Lane knows, it, at best, would settle those beliefs, but “would” is compatible with “won’t.” This kind of emphasis can make scientific inquiry seem more straightforward than it really is. Though he is usually a marvelously grounded philosopher of science, Peirce himself can sometimes make inquiry sound like it involves little more than sampling beans from a small roster of bags, and I think that such oversimplifications led him to make important mistakes.4 So my worry, stated very roughly, is that the relative neglect of the messiness of inquiry, of complexities of cognitive motivation, and of the needs of non-ideal inquirers, can make Peirce’s enormously ambitious realism seem almost inevitable. We do well to think about dubiously commensurate vocabularies and cognitive values and of truths abandoned, rediscovered and abandoned again as we consider what inquiry would have revealed. Any vices Lane exhibits along these lines are more than compensated for, even in the currency of epistemologists, by his fascinating discussions of hope, optimism, and confidence in the face of deficit indeterminacy and the problem of buried secrets. I have learned a lot from those discussions and regret that Lane has little to learn from me about them.

Works Cited

Haack, S. 1978. Philosophy of Logics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kasser, J. 2016. “Two Conceptions of Weight of Evidence in Peirce’s Illustrations of the Logic of Science.” Erkenntniss 81: 629–48.

Kvanvig, J. 2003. The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lane, R. 2018. Peirce on Realism and Idealism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Migotti, M. 1998. “Peirce’s Double-Aspect Theory of Truth.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supplementary vol. 24, Pragmatism: 75–108.

Peirce, C. S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1–6, edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Vols. 7–8, edited by A. Burks. Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1931–58. Cited as CP, plus volume and paragraph number.

———. The Essential Peirce. Vol. 2. Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP2 plus page number.

———. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Peirce Edition Project. 8 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as W, plus volume and page number.

Short, T. L. 2000. “Peirce on the Aim of Inquiry: Another Reading of ‘Fixation.’” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 36: 1–23.

Wright, C. 1992. Truth and Objectivity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.