One of the four methods of research or ways of establishing beliefs described by Charles Peirce; also called the a priori method.
According to the proponents of this method, we should accept, in the course of our struggle to overcome doubt, that faith that is best suited to our individual reason. “Suited to reason” does not mean what is consistent with experience, but what we are prone to believe. As with the method of perseverance and authority, this method is fatally elusive, its elusiveness is that it “makes research something like the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is more or less a matter of fashion…“(CP 5.383).
Unlike the scientific method, these three ways of establishing beliefs do not take experience seriously enough; nor do they consider the adequacy of reality. In our more reasonable moments, we understand that reality is not just what we tend to assume; it is something very different from our concepts of it.
The only true way to establish our beliefs must be uncompromisingly committed to the idea of reality – and modestly open to the ways in which reality itself is shown to us through our experience. At least that’s what Peirce thinks.
