Abstract

The author wants to explode what she sees as over-confidence in contemporary Peirce scholarship regarding the potential for "real" convergence of opinion by the "community of investigators." Rosenthal suggests Peirce's position entails the impossibility of anything like the ultimate epistemic convergence frequently attributed to him. She concludes Peirce really defends a "Pragmatic Pluralism" which is philosophically aligned with Kuhn's paradigmatic interpretation of science. She argues that inherent pluralism permeates his understanding of meaning as habit, his proofs for realism, and his derivation of his metaphysical categories.