Peirce’s Vera Causa of Guessing

Abstract

A thinker, confronted with the somewhat improbable task of making a right guess under stressful conditions involving a high risk to the thinker’s well being if the guess is wrong, is able to make the right guess more often than mere chance would dictate. In two cases c. 1907, Peirce asserts that mere chance does not suffice to explain a true guess. But the “vera causa of true guessing” involves a trick that the thinker must play on himself in order to dislodge the interference of his own ego in the guessing process. I shall analyze the phenomenon of the vera causa, as Peirce describes it in MSS 687 in terms of his notion of the triadicity of a true communication.