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Pierce! he is a pragmatist. there were three essays, one about the dangers of fixated beliefs, one about how we can make our ideas clearer, and one about his conception of Pragmatism. what's kind of funny is that his essay on how one can make their ideas clear was the most boring, convoluted essay i read since Edwards.

the object of reasoning to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we don't know. drawing inferences is not so much a natural gift as it is a long and difficult art. it is either an acquired or constitutional habit of mind to draw one inference rather than another from a set of given premises. we have in us a guiding principle of inference! yeah!

then he goes on to distinguish doubts and beliefs. beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions actively, while doubts do not. doubt is a state of dissatisfaction from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into a state of belief. "the irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain belief." this struggle, Pierce says, is inquiry! and so the sole end of inquiry is therefore to settle some opinion or other.
we shouldn't cling to beliefs, he says! but unfortunately, we do, and in a multitude of ways:
.method of tenacity: the method of personally fixing onto a belief
.method of authority: fixing a belief societally. this leads to Inquisitions and Holocausts and Pro-Lifers and other societal horrors.
.method of a priori: metaphysicians do this and annoy pragmatists.
.method of science: YES THIS IS THE RIGHT ONE SAYS PIERCE. this is the method where we look at Reality! capital R!

then he talks about how to make ideas clear. we should be masters of our own meaning, he says! thought is a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations. a belief is something we are aware of that appeases the irritation of doubt (which he covered in the previous essay). belief involves the establishment of habit (which can be dangerously fixed, which he also covered in the previous essay). habit is a rule of action in our nature. belief is a stadium for mental action.

the identity of a habit depends on when and how it causes us to act. attaining a 3rd degree of clarity in expressing ideas has a rule that involves this: "consider what effects we conceive the object of our conception have -- our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object."

the Real is defined as that whose characters are independent of what anyone may think them to be. if something is hopelessly beyond the reach of our knowledge, does it not exist? well, who cares, says Pierce, but really, if investigation is carried far enough, it will yield a belief in what is real, but only practical distinctions really have meaning. for this reason is metaphysics (says the pragmatist) a study much more curious than useful.

what's his view of pragmatism? i don't really know it very well, it's like an aggregate of the things he said in the other two essays. doubt is a state of irritation to produce belief and also a privation of habit, belief is not a momentary mode of consciousness but rather a habit of mind that endures for some time and is perfectly self-satisfied and mostly unconscious. Reality is out there, but really it is only meaningful to investigate it if it is practical to our lives.