Abstract

Peirce stresses that the pragmatist qua pragmatist must embrace realism as opposed to nominalism. He offers as well “proofs” of realism which are open to various criticisms. Within the framework of his pragmatic vision, the experiential sense of realism is inseparable from the functioning of habit in the flow of time. What is being verified by experimental testing is, ultimately, not a particular scientific law, nor scientific laws in general, but rather the common sense expectation of predictive reliability rooted in the primitive epistemic “feel” of real potentiality, a belief which is dubitable in principle, and which is, in fact, often doubted at the abstract, reflective levels of science, logic, and philosophy, but which, at the level of rudimentary perceptual experience is fundamental to our very sense of our world, and is well verified by the continual availability of our perceptual world. The concrete functioning of habit provides, epistemically, the conceptual counterpart of the real lawfulness held to exist in the world, and provides, ontologically, an example of this real lawfulness. Peirce’s dispositional theory of meaning leads to a metaphysics of realism as opposed to a nominalism, a realism not of eternal essences but a “process realism” in which there are real modes of behavior which govern what occurs.