ABSTRACT
Despite the originality and sophistication of Apel's transcendentalist interpretation of Peirce, according to which first, Peirce "always adhered to Kantianism in the form of a reinterpretation of the concept of regulative principles to which nothing empirical can correspond", and, second, "there is an analogy in Peirce's thought to the transcendental deduction", it can be argued that Peirce's appropriation of the Kantian notion of a regulative principle is in fact a contributing factor in his failure to provide a transcendental deduction for his own list of categories. Peirce's pragmatist means by truth, is conditional upon the reality of the categories, whether there obtain in empirical reality the conditions necessary for our inquiries to reach any such final consensus is a matter of contingent natural fact, so requires a posteriori evidence that scientific investigation has a tendency to yield final states of informed consensus. in Peirce's view, acknowledge the fallibility of any present state of empirical evidence.
