I recently read your article criticizing Geese Magazine, and while I am grateful that someone has finally decided to criticize them for their (as you say) "pragmatist idealism," I do want to share some comments regarding the article's interpretation of Peirce. The article, perhaps understandably due to Geese Magazine's explanation, somewhat mischaracterizes Peirce by:

1. Failing to take into account his thorough-going fallibilism. The article's author applies a criticism to Peirce that he would heartily agree with, i.e. that "no science is strictly true". Peirce was a staunch fallibilist, holding that even the basic tenets of mathematics were *in principle* fallibly held. In that sense, the mere fact that there have been paradigm changes is parallel rather than contrary to Peircean epistemology.
2. Placing the wrong emphasis on what defines 'truth' for Peirce. This is a somewhat common misunderstanding, but Peirce does not define truth solely in terms of 'agreement'. It is more accurate to say that truth, for Peirce, is that which survives any relevant doubt, what he calls a 'settled belief'. Peirce’s fallibilism is formulated in negative terms, i.e. we hold a belief to be true until we have reason to doubt, until we are met by some “surprising or recalcitrant experience.” This is why he can simultaneously say that 1+1=2 is both true and fallible-in-principle. The idea that it could ever be meaningfully doubted is beyond comprehension.
3. Misunderstanding what the 'ideal community' is, related to the above. Peirce's notion of truth is counterfactual rather than merely historical. While the article correctly identifies, following Geese's explanation, that there is no literal 'ideal community', it misses this nuance in applying Peirce's notion to the history of science. The direction of a belief, i.e., that it will hold up under future scrutiny, is what is relevant to Peirce's epistemology. I do not have the relevant citations immediately on-hand, so please forgive the following self-quote from my own notes:

As Misak notes in Truth and the End of Inquiry, a more useful means of thinking about truth from a Peircean perspective is through that of the subjunctive conditional, ‘would-be’, rather than the indicative conditional, ‘will-be’; that is to say, Peirce offers an account of what would be true as opposed to will be true. Misak formulates it as such: “if, if inquiry were pursued sufficiently far, then H would be believed, then H is true.”...Peirce is claiming that “what we commit ourselves to is experience falling in line with the belief or with some successor of it; and what we expect is that the proposition in some form will survive future inquiry.” [quoting Christopher Hookway] In other words, Peirce’s theory of truth is an extension of his fallibilism toward belief...Further, in considering the social effects of Peirce’s theory of truth, it is important to remember that inquiry is a necessarily communitarian effort which cannot be decided on an individual basis.

It's important to clarify what 'doubt' here means, as in contrast to James or Rorty, Peircean pragmatism is strongly and necessarily communitarian in the broadest possible sense ("without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase in knowledge"). The "community of inquiry", for Peirce, consists of the *entirety* of inquirers. An individual's doubt that climate change might be fake is not strictly what Peirce means by doubt, any more than an individual's skepticism about the realism of an external world (which is the kind of skepticism pragmatism is supposed to block). While individual doubt can further inquiry, mere doubt without backing has no meaningful consequence for its truth-value. The 'truth' of climate change is very stable in the terms that matter to Peirce.

Likewise, and I believe this is a failure of understanding on the part of Geese Magazine rather than the article's author, Peirce's notion of truth is very much a *realist* notion, though of a peculiar kind. The fact that the external 'fact-of-the-matter' pushes back against false belief is very important to Peircean epistemology. To give a crude example, if I believe I can fly, that belief will be crushed the moment I hit the ground from a jump. In other words, that "the existence of a fundamental mind- or human-independent world and that natural scientific knowledge is about this mind-independent or human-independent world" is a requirement for Peirce's epistemology to make any sense at all. The fact that the world is independent of any particular inquirer or community of inquirers is what makes inquiry possible in the first place.

Peirce, in his own way, agrees with Engels' criticism of the thing-in-itself, i.e.

If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”. The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such “things-in-themselves” until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the “thing-in-itself” became a thing for us — as, for instance, alizarin, the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar. For 300 years, the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with 100, 1,000, 10,000 to 1 chances in its favor, but still always a hypothesis. But then Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when [Johann] Galle really found this planet [Neptune, discovered 1846, at Berlin Observatory], the Copernican system was proved.

For much of his career, he regarded the Kantian 'thing-in-itself' (insofar as it means something wholly beyond cognition) as meaningless.

Based on my own readings of the relevant Geese Magazine articles and my prior familiarity with the American pragmatists, I believe that some of these nuances are being imported without clarification into Geese's writings. In that sense, I think clarifying these nuances is important to accurately criticize what Geese is doing, even though it may seem needlessly obscure and specialist.

And I do apologize for the specialist dive! But it is surprising that Peirce has even been brought into this discussion at all. Though I am an independent Peirce scholar and though I find him surprisingly amenable to Marxism, he is notoriously difficult and inconsistent in his writings. I would not, in any world, make him part of the foundation for an entire magazine's political project. I look forward to the future article further criticizing Geese Magazine.

Thank you,

Clara S.