ABSTRACT
In 1885, Peirce quoted Hegel, ‘We must be in contact with our subject matter, whether it be by means of our external senses, or what is better, by our profounder mind and our innermost self consciousness’ (8.41 n), and he commented:
While Peirce and Hegel agree that the ‘outward clash’ of the external senses can put us into contact with our subject matter, or enable our cognition to ‘mean something real’, Hegel views this as a second-rate sort of contact with reality and aspires to something better. Peirce, on the other hand, holds that this form of secondness is our only means of access to reality; the real world which is the object of our inquiries is, we might say, only encountered through perception. The theory of perception obviously occupies a fundamental role in Peirce’s epistemology, and we must now turn to an examination of his account of how our beliefs can be answerable to perception. First, we must clarify what is at stake in the discussion of how we are in contact with our subject matter, of what the problem is about how cognition can ‘mean something real’.
