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Abstract
In the first part of this paper I argue that the majority of the interpretations of Peirce's understanding of instinct have come through the 1898 lecture where Peirce says that instinct and reason should remain distinct, a statement that is accepted at face value by many Peirce scholars. However, there is a more comprehensive way of understanding this division and it hangs on the interpretation of instinct. I intend to test this distinction of reason and instinct against Peirce's other writings, By the end of the first part of this paper, the traditional definition of instinct will have been freed up. In the second part I show how there is a deeper understanding of instinct that helps to explain how we can be so right in our guesses about nature. Our ability to be right so much of the time can be accounted for by looking at what Peirce means by " rheme", one of his semiotic categories formed by his theory of inquiry.