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the environments in which they found themselves and checked and corrected their interpretations of that

interaction with each other as perspectives are gained over time. Here, Peirce`s pragmatism understood

that we are influenced by things and other persons precisely by having our activity shaped in interaction

with them. So this acknowledges Rorty`s causal account of language`s relationship to the world without

succumbing to the antirealist position. On the contrary, something like Peirce`s pragmatism enables and

requires us to take both the world and one another seriously.

This leads, naturally, to Peirce`s response to Rorty`s coherentist view of truth. From the

foregoing, it should be discernible that Peirce assumed some sort of coherentism in his insistence on

knowledge as accumulated communal discovery and wisdom. More specifically, truth is that to which

opinion converges in the infinite long run. Yet Peirce said much more about truth than this.

He also

viewed truth propositionally, and that such propositions connect our cognitions with reality: Truth is the

correspondence of a representation with its object.

But having rejected Cartesian intuitionism which

grounded knowledge in self-evident and direct intuitions of external reality,

Peirce realized that while

propositions emerge from perception and experience and correspond in a dyadic fashion to reality, they

do not function in that same dyadic manner. Rather, any real proposition, as a semiotic relation, must be

categorically triadic. In itself (as a First), a proposition is a sign that stands against an object (a Second)

and is capable of determining an interpretation (a Third). The interpretation either gets at the relation

Reality, in Richard Bernstein, ed., Perspectives on Peirce: Critical Essays on Charles Sanders Peirce (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1965), 92-119.

Apart from which, as argued by Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The

Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty (London and New York: Verso, 1995), Rorty`s vision for a liberal and
democratic society crumbles. Further, from explicitly Christian theological perspectives, a realistic theological
anthropology provides the needed addition to Peirce`s ontology of otherness which strengthens its capacity for
ideological critique and resistance; on this point, see Eduardo J. Echeverria, Do Human Rights Spring from Our
Nature as Human Beings? Reflections on Richard Rorty, Philosophia Christi 20:1 (1997): 41-53, and Steve Lemke,
Pluralism and Pain in Richard Rorty`s Liberal Utopia (a.k.a., An Overview of Rorty`s Liberal Utopia),
unpublished paper presented at the Southwestern Regional Conference of the Evangelical Theological Society,
Dallas, TX, 27-28 March, 1998.

Much has been written on Peirce`s theory of truth. For starters, see Peirce`s paper on Truth in Collected

Papers, 5.549-73. Cf. also Robert Almeder, Peirce`s Thirteen Theories of Truth, Transactions of the Charles S.
Peirce Society 21:1 (1985): 77-94.

Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.553-54.