Peirce's attempt at making the two claims coherent is what I would like to call discursive realism. It is opposed to what might be called the discursive idealism of Rorty or Foucault, in which there is neither a privileged discourse, nor can any representational system that can mirror a reality external to such a system. It is also opposed to the standard metaphysical realism which argues that the true is that representation which corresponds to something that exists externally to any system of representation. Instead, I believe it can be argued, that Peirce claims, that although there is a reality external to any system of representation, it is only in that capacity a dynamism, a secondness; consequently, its being is not complete, but completed in its representation, which is gained through a discursive process of inquiry. "The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of mea an you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge" (CP 5.311). Or, as he says in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear ": "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality" (CP 5.407). But Peirce continues that, nonetheless, "reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men may think about it," that, "though the object of the final opinion depends on what that opinion is, yet what that opinion is does not depend on what you or I or any man thinks" (CP 5.408).

      For Peirce, making coherence out of ostensibly contradictory claims–that reality is independent of representation, yet dependent upon it, rests on his claim that there are three modalities of being : possibility, actuality and generality (CP 1.23ff), and that it is only in representation that the third can be realized, and the place where all three are unified. It must be kept in mind that for Peirce, "a reality which has no representation is one which has no relation and no quality" (CP 5.312). It is only through representation that a quality can be conveyed, and a generalization established. Thus, the representational system at the end of inquiry serves to complete the real, not simply to correspond to it. The real becomes fully real in an through its true representations, and true representations are found at the end of inquiry.

      The inconsistent claims that reality is independent of representation but dependent upon it is made coherent, if we understand that one modality of reality, secondness is the only modality independent of representation. Understanding the character and role of secondness in Peirce's system is vital, then, to understanding its coherence, and its unique position. It is the misunderstanding of secondness, after all, which Peirce blames for Hegel's error–Peirce says, after all, that he could agree with Hegel save for the absence of secondness in his system (CP 1.368; 1.42). Peirce also attributes Kant's errors to the same source (cf. (CP 6.95).

      Secondness –the "Outward Clash"--is that which makes us realize that there is something external to our representational systems, and gives us access to that mode of being–actuality. A metaphysics which ignores secondness is useless; if a philosophy, in principle, cannot entertain the reality in the insistence of disease, or the imperviousness of a brick wall, or the gravity of the mountain, then it cannot tell us anything truthful about the world. At the same time, the goal of inquiry is not simply to acknowledge the dumb brutishness of life, but to live in it, and not in the way in which a pin ball might live in the confines of its machine, but in the way that achieves comprehension and control in our lives. It is in generality that such things are possible, and it is this modality of reality that emerges in true representational systems. Consequently, we are motivated to investigate, to engage in discursive practices precisely for this reason.

      The enormously important question, then, is what makes a representational system true? But the even more important question is why do we want true representations? But, as it turns out, the very idea of investigative discourse, as Peirce soon discovers, must carry with it certain normative presuppositions–finding the truth as it turns out, commits us to a certain way of being together, certain normative guidelines that are intractable. The reason why we want the truth is that its pursuit yields a normatively qualitative way of life. How is this conclusion reached?

      In order for discourses to generate true representations, its mode of inquiry must be conducive to 2ndness. 2ndness provides only constraint and limit on representations; its says nothing positive to us, there is no content to 2ndness; our goal then is not to know the dynamic object, but to at least minimally arrange our discourses so that the 2ndness of the dynamic object can limit or constrain the representations within our discourses. This requires that our investigative discourses involve methods and processes that are both receptive and designed to be amenable to secondness. For Peirce, at least, science, so far as it involves operationalization, experimentation and observation, conforms to such a model.

      Secondly, in order for inquiry to generate true representations–accurate generalizations-- it must proceed with the right sort of reasoning, one that can wrest the truth from 2ndness. Peirce elaborates a three-pronged, interconnected cycle of reasoning that, once again, is modeled in science: abduction, the reasoning which allows us to develop new representations in light of the shock, surprise and anomaly of our old ones; deduction, which allows us to develop, systematically, those things which we should expect from our existing representations, and, induction, which is the measure of which representations we should keep, and which ones we should discard.

      But what Peirce discovers in following the process of inquiry further, is what grounds these processes of reasoning? We cannot, without inconsistency, prove these processes of reasoning without employing them. The ultimate leading principles of the three principles of reasoning all turn out to require the presupposition of an indefinitely extended community of inquiry, and the hope in such a process, a final opinion will be reached. For example, the ultimate leading principle of deduction is that if a particular logical principle is valid, then in no analogous case will it lead to a false conclusion from true premises (CP 2.204, 2.267, 4.477, W4: 246). In other words the validity of a necessary inference depends on its tendency to generate true conclusions in all analogous circumstances. In effect this is a principle of induction, since it requires a universal confirmation of all analogous cases on the basis of a finite set. The ultimate leading principle of induction is that a method such as as induction , "if steadily adhered to, would at length lead to an indefinite approximation to the truth, or, at least, would assure the reasoner of ultimately attaining as close an approach to the truth as he can, in any way, be assured of attaining" (CP 2.204; cf. CP 1.93). This is, again, based on the principle expressed in the "law of large numbers," that a whole is better known as we know more and more of its parts, a convergence will take place as more and more observations are made, or more and larger samples are employed. The ultimate leading principle of abduction is that the human mind is akin to the truth in the sense that in a finite number of guesses human minds will light upon the correct hypothesis (CP 5. 172, 5. 173), but, again, the proof of it requires success in the long run, that is, the proof is in the ability of a community of investigators to guess successfully most of the time; of course, since our guesses cannot be shown to be right unless they are inductively selected, then the principle of induction, with its need for an indefinitely extended investigation , is the keystone to the entire edifice.

      How, then, could induction be justified on this basis? Only if indeed we successfully reached the end of inquiry–that would be proof that the principle of induction was indeed the right road to truth all along. And how is that possible? Only if we have an indefinitely extended community of inquirers, where the community is so constituted that it promotes and does not block the road of inquiry. In the end, Peirce's critical logic rests on his universal rhetoric, in the sense of articulating the formal structure of discursive practices. As Peirce points out in "The Fixation of Belief," communities that would block the road of inquiry are evident: communities that simply exclude hypotheses or opinions by fiat, those which justify by means of authority. The community which does not block the road of inquiry, then, is one that does not justify ultimately by authority, but by publicly accessible, repeatable and openly demonstrative evidence; it is a community that is open to criticism, and adopts a fallibilistic attitude; it is one that stresses the equality and symmetry of inquirers to propose, refute and support claims. In general, in order to maintain the indefiniteness of inquiry and to insure that the right sort of reasoning is taking place, the community must be normatively structured in a certain way in order to assure the success of inquiry. The search for truth, the last representation, commits us to living in a community with a certain normative structure, and all inquiry has its grounds in norms.

      This sounds fine, except that it generates what Manley Thomson called "the paradox of Peirce's realism": if Peirce's realism requires the real is knowable, then "nothing can remain ultimately unkowable only if an ultimately unknowable fact is assumed, viz,, the indefinite continuation of intellectual inquiry" (1952: 138). In other words, the foundation of Peirce's discursive realism rests on the actuality of an indefinite community of inquirers and their success at inquiry. If we want to find the truth , we are committed to inquire by employing certain forms of reasoning which, in turn, commits us to a certain sort of normatively structured community; the assurance, then, that we will find the truth rests on the claim that such a normatively structured community will be successful. Yet to justify any claim, including this one, we must appeal to the success of the community that we want to be assured of.

      Peirce, I think, tries to address this issue in a couple of different ways–as we'll see shortly. But I think the one that proves to be the most secure in this respect is the approach that changes it away from a empirical or even a metaphysical question to a normative one, that is, to a practical question–in Kant's sense of the term. The representability of the real at the end of inquiry becomes a practical postulate, in the sense that it is a necessary presupposition for the sense of inquiry. Its presupposition is not its guarantee, but its presupposition commits its practitioners to a certain way of life that, like happiness or flourishing, has endotelic or self-justifying reasons–one is not happy for the sake of something else, nor does one flourish for any reason than to flourish–it is a reason that answers all other reasons, and so satisfies the aesthetic ideal. For Peirce, such a community achieves a "concrete reasonableness" even if it is not successful at acquiring the truth. Such a community is endotelic and generates a life that has Socratic worthiness ("life without inquiry is not worth living").

      Let me unpack some of these claims by looking at Peirce's argument for the practical postulate of the community of inquirers, and his possible solutions to Thomson's paradox. One way of framing this problem, is to imagine Peirce trying to answer Meno's dilemma, found in Plato's dialogue of the same name (although I can't find any place where Peirce mentions it specifically). After inquiring into the nature of virtue, Meno is convinced by Socrates that he (Meno) does not know what virtue is–although at one time he thought he had; and Socrates confesses that he doesn't know either. Meno then poses the following dilemma: why inquire then? If we know something already, certainly there is no need to inquire, but if we don't know something, how would we ever know that we knew it–even if we came across it by accident, how would we recognize that it is the true answer to our inquiry? Of course, Plato's answer involves going between the horns of the dilemma with the theory of recollection–so that we are in a state of neither knowing nor not-knowing, but simply forgetting what we already know. Kant answers it differently. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason begins from a very basic paradox at the foundation of human knowledge: how do we know what we know if all we have is our representations of things? If we rely on the so-called correspondence theory (adaequatio rei et intellectus) we could never give Meno a satisfactory answer, since to employ that criterion we must already know the nature of things to which our concepts or our propositions or our representations prove adequate. Unless we can somehow magically step outside of our representations of those objects in order to see them as they really are, then is no hope that this criteria can serve as a foundation for human knowledge. Kant's solution, of course, is to suggest that rather than the foundation of our knowledge lying in the conformity of our concepts to objects, the objects conform to the form of our concepts. But less this lapse into the worst sort of subjective idealism, the objects must be phenomenal objects, that is, the object as it is experienced by us, rather than a real or noumenal object. The price of a foundation to our knowledge is the limit of what we can know. We are limited to our own experiences, reasoning beyond experience is antinimous and speculative.

      But, as we know, although Peirce begins with Kant's problematics, and makes many of his same assumption, he doesn't come to the same solution. Peirce, I think, gives three different types of answers to this dilemma, one a practical answer, a second an empirical one, and a third a normative one.

      The practical answer (really a pragmatic answer in the sense of Kant –cf. Critique of Pure Reason B852 ) goes something like this: why should we inquire? Because it would be completely insane or irrational not to. It's there–we can inquire, and if there is any possibility of knowing the real it is through inquiry–so why not? This argument suggests that for any rational decision-maker it is perfectly rational to hope that inquiry will succeed. The choice could be perceived as a rational choice in the sense that you are more likely to have success if inquiry is so constituted, and it is rational to choose those practices that are more likely to succeed at what you want (cf. Putnam 1987: 82). There are several passages in Peirce that use this sort of reasoning (some of which have been already cited–excuse the redundancy):