Abstract

Peirce never explicitly clarifies his understanding of “the real world,” though he refers to it frequently throughout his writings. This lack can well go unremarked, for it is a common sense term which slides easily into a common sense identification with “what is the case” or “what there is”, which then may receive various philosophic labels, depending upon whether one interprets Peirce as a realist, an idealist, or a phenomenalist. When such an identification is questioned, however, “the real world” fits inadequately within the confines of any of the above labels, for it is a distinctively pragmatic world. Peirce, in radically rejecting the role of humans as spectators, in understanding experience as a unity of interaction between humans and that facticity which gives itself within experience, holds at once that the real world is the perceived world, that the real world has an independence from mind, and yet that the perceived world is partially dependent upon the noetic act and is thus relative in its nature to the mind. The supposed incompatibility of these three characteristics of the relation of thought to the real world stems from a failure to radically and once and for all reject the presuppositions of a spectator theory of knowledge.