Abstract

In this paper I shall try to give you a good reason for sharing with Peirce his doubts on Pragmatism. What I am going to maintain is that Peirce found in his Semeiotic, through which he was looking for a real “proof” for pragmatism, hints, vanishing points that made him think that pragmatism was just a part of a richer logical realm and of a far richer reality. What he doubted was not pragmatism in itself but that it could comprehend the whole realm of logic. The key of the point that I want to make is the famous “rational instinct”, but in order to understand its role and function I have to go through some clues that it is possible to find in the first branch of semeiotics and then to confirm my analysis with a brief reference to Methodeutics. In the end I will suggest that these reasons, which urged Peirce to increase the importance of the rational instinct, are the same that lie beneath his latest and worse known ideas on continuity and infinity. It is well known that in his late years Peirce was dealing with many things: he was writing “The Amazing Mazes of Mathematics”, he was trying to develop his theory of continuity and he was trying to re-publish his papers on Pragmatism with some correction. In the confused manuscripts of this last period of his life you can find, whatever was the topic he was talking about, questions on which he kept pondering again and again. In doing this kind of analysis Peirce often stated points that do not have a precise development or that cannot find a precise collocation in his synthetic statements. Therefore, what I am going to do is to underline these points and then to try drawing a conclusion that can account for them. The only problem of this task is due to the unavoidable brevity of a paper so that my discourse will probably look more a chain not stronger that is its weakest link than a cable whose every fiber helps the strength of the whole.