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the object(s) of interpretation.

So even here, we see that Peirce`s affirmation of a theoretical

correspondence between language and reality avoids the undesirable results of modernity`s debates about

truth--whether Kantian agnosticism, neo-pragmatic skepticism or even fundamentalist literalism--while

leaving instead the legacy of pragmatism as a pragmatic conception of knowledge and value as modes of

action subject to testable terminations in experience and guided by predictable properties of the physical

world....

But what is needed is a more precise account of how the world or reality measures our

interpretations truthfully--in Rorty`s terms, how the environment causes organisms to develop efficient

and satisfying habits of action. And such an account will not be available apart from a fully developed

philosophy of nature. Here, Peirce`s scientific realism which launched early pragmatists such as Dewey

on the quest for a scientific understanding of nature comes back into focus. For Peirce, as for Dewey,

reality norms human interpretations through our interactions with it. This is no intuitive picture- or

mirror-theory of truth ably criticized by Rorty. Rather, truthful empirical content emerges in our engaging

with and responding to the world, and in the ways which it influences and shapes our activity. As such,

what carries over are the values of the world`s otherness which we need to register, heed, and respect in

order for us appropriate and successful habits to emerge. Insofar as Rorty and other neo-pragmatists have

and the Nazis, We may both have to reach for our guns (Universality and Truth, 13-14).

For more on the difference between Peirce and Rorty on this point, see Umberto Eco, Unlimited

Semeiosis and Drift: Pragmaticism vs. Pragmatism`, in Kenneth Laine Ketner, ed., Peirce and Contemporary
Thought: Philosophical Inquiries (New York: Fordham University Press, 1995), 205-21.But is Peirce`s fallibilism
viciously incoherent since such a claim regarding fallibilism would have to be infallible itself? Rorty`s response is
that, The question of whether the pragmatist view of truth that it is not a profitable topic is itself true is thus a
question about whether a post-Philosophical culture is a good thing to try for (Consequences of Pragmatism, xliii).
Peirce himself avoided this charge by describing the doctrine of fallibilism not as a truth claim (a proposition or
belief) but as a defining condition of propositions: But you will say, I am setting up this very proposition as
infallible truth. Not at all; it is a mere definition. I do not say that it is infallibly true that there is any belief to which a
person would come if he were to carry his inquiries far enough. I can only say that that alone is what I call Truth. I
cannot infallibly know that there is any truth; see Peirce`s letter to Lady Welby, 23 Dec. 1908, in Charley D.
Hardwick, ed., Semiotic & Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 73; italics Peirce`s. My own response is to say that a fallibilist
simply holds that any particular belief may be wrong and in need of revision, not that all beliefs are necessarily
wrong.