Catching up on my reading - apologies for not responding much the past week or two.
It seems to me the starting point for thinking about truth for Peirce ought be externalism. That is are we talking about a knower who is roughly a human individual at a specific time or are we talking about truth in semiotic broader than any one individual. While Peirce occasionally talks of epistemology along a more traditional Cartesian conception by and large when he speaks of truth he’s speaking of this broader conception. Unless we keep that in mind I think we’ll always go astray. An individual then ‘has’ truth to the degree that the sign within them is the same as this final interpretant. The next thing to keep in mind is that Peirce still maintains the traditional conception of proposition or statement as carriers of truth. By which he means they are signs that signify this interpretant. As the quotes Jon put up on wikipedia indicate we thus have a sort of correspondence but not a Cartesian sort. It’s not the correspondence of an internal image with an external object. Rather it’s the correspondence of the object signified through a sign with an interpretant that is the same as the final interpretant. The odd feature of Peirce’s conception of truth is that this sign need not be in a particular knowing subject. (I’m not sure of the implications of that since it gets into the question of intentionality in Peircean semiotics) The biggest difference between Peirce and more traditional conceptions of truth in the loose Cartesian tradition (including Kant) would be that truth is essentially wrapped up with signs. It is triadic whereas for most philosophy correspondence and even coherence is merely dualistic. I’ve been thinking of my original question I posed a month or two ago. That is what is the status of truth. To the degree an object signifies a stable interpretant it seems to me that truth is fated or necessary regardless of whether one adopts modal realism. I’ve come around to the idea that fundamentally what’s at stake with my question is less the question of truth than the question of time. That is to ask if truth exists is to ask when a sign is complete. If one adopts presentism or some related ontological conception of time then this seems to play havoc with Peirce’s semiotic. (Maybe others will disagree with me there) The way out of this problem is either to embrace a four dimensional theory of time in which case there is already a truth about the future or else to embrace the later Peirce’s modal realism and simply talk about truth as those signs that are in all possible universes. That is to embrace the kind of robust talk of possibilities we see in contemporary modal realism.
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