Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an American philosopher who initiated the movement known as “pragmatism.” Although Peirce doesn’t discuss truth directly and most of our discussion this week will concern the views of another pragmatist, William James (1842-1910), Peirce’s ideas have had an independent influence on later discussions of truth.

The paper we will be discussing includes Peirce’s main statement of the idea of pragmatism. That appears in paragraphs you will see marked in the margin as “5.400” and “5.402.” (The various numbers in the margin of the PDF indicate locations in different editions of the paper—plain numbers from its original publication, numbers with decimal points from vol. 5 of an older edition of Peirce’s collected papers that numbers paragraphs, and ones beginning with ‘W’ from a currently on-going chronological edition of all of his writings.)

We will be most interested in Peirce’s application of his idea to the concept of reality. That application is developed in the course of his section IV, but it is stated most succinctly at the end of paragraph 5.407.