We are in the arena, not outside it.

Reading the circumlocution below, there can be no doubt why pragmaticism, Peirce’s ultimate rescue of pragmatism from the maw of misapprehension, ends up venerating only what is the practical outcome of any process of consideration.

Everything else is too opaque.

We cannot follow our own thinking. Thus, slowing down to a gentle pace and going step by step is perhaps the best part of wisdom. Then arriving at something is less likely to meet some untoward incident.

It is entertaining to read Peirce’s open confessions. I wish our academics would be as forthcoming.

Admit that the waters around us roil and ebb as they are forced to do. And be grateful for squibs of clarity we obtain during rare and happy slow-down moments.

It is always a bit daunting to go for some time without such conversation, measured and valued.

But I digress.

The hope in all this is that when we humbly rise to take hold of logic and and seek to practice it, we can be certain that we are in good hands. We are embarked on a good way. We can look forward to a good result.

It will be fallible. It will be buffered by the vagaries of continuity. It may be subject to forced amendment.

But we are in the arena, not outside it. We are at at least the outer reaches of consciousness.

Peirce: CP 2.141 Cross-Ref:††

Hundreds of percepts have succeeded one another while I have been setting down these sentences. I recognize that there is a percept or flow of percepts very different from anything I can describe or think. What precisely that is I cannot even tell myself. It would be gone, long before I could tell myself many items; and those items would be quite unlike the percepts themselves. In this thought there would always be effort or endeavor. Whatever is the product of effort might be suppressed by effort, and therefore is subject to possible error. I am forced to content myself not with the fleeting percepts, but with the crude and possibly erroneous thoughts, or self-informations, of what the percepts were. The science of psychology assures me that the very percepts were mental constructions, not the first impressions of sense. But what the first impressions of sense may have been, I do not know except inferentially and most imperfectly. Practically, the knowledge with which I have to content myself, and have to call “the evidence of my senses,” instead of being in truth the evidence of the senses, is only a sort of stenographic report of that evidence, possibly erroneous.†P2 In place of the percept, which, although not the first impression of sense, is a construction with which my will has had nothing to do, and may, therefore, properly be called the “evidence of my senses,” the only thing I carry away with me is the perceptual facts, or the intellect’s description of the evidence of the senses, made by my endeavor. These perceptual facts are wholly unlike the percept, at best; and they may be downright untrue to the percept.†P1 But I have no means whatever of criticizing, correcting or recomparing them, except that I can collect new perceptual facts relating to new percepts, and on that basis may infer that there must have been some error in the former reports, or on the other hand I may in this way persuade myself that the former reports were true. The perceptual facts are a very imperfect report of the percepts; but I cannot go behind that record. As for going back to the first impressions of sense, as some logicians recommend me to do, that would be the most chimerical of undertakings.