ABSTRACT
It is not surprising that, at one place, Charles Sanders Peirce rejects the traditional dichotomy between the “concrete” and the “abstract” as a nominalist creation. Peirce agrees that perception requires Secondness or brute clash between oneself and the external environment. Peirce argues that nothing can be present to the mind that is absolutely determinate in every respect possible, and his argument turns on the point that we are limited in our cognitive powers. The definition of perception that Peirce gives in the 1903 manuscript is not intended to avoid such gray cases. Though Peirce does not think that perceptual judgments are always true, clearly he is not a skeptic. Peirce argues in the 1903 Harvard lectures, “abductive inference shades into perceptual judgment without any sharp line of demarcation between them”. There is evidence that, even very early on, Peirce held that people perceive some real generals.
