ABSTRACT
After 1870, Peirce’s manuscripts show that he was trying to rework his conception of reality. He was aware of the sorts of problems that we noted at the end of the previous chapter, and sought a theory which would enable him to avoid them. During the period that he was regularly attending meetings of the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, the period when his pragmatism was born, Peirce was working on a treatise, the ‘Logic’ of 1873. This was never published, but we can trace the development of Peirce’s thought about reality from the drafts that have survived. The views that it contained appeared in a series of papers, published in the Popular Scientific Monthly in 1877-8 under the running title Illustrations of the Logic of Science: the series contained his famous papers ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear.’ He subsequently claimed that he had been deeply dissatisfied with this work from soon after its publication, and when he returned to epistemological issues after 1890, he offered new foundations for his theory of reality, treating logic as one of a trio of ‘normative sciences’. In this chapter, we shall examine both the doctrines of the 1870s and Peirce’s later claims about truth and reality.
