 The final section of ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’ promises to consider a fundamental logical conception, reality. This concept seems clear: ‘every child uses it with perfect confidence, never dreaming that he does not understand it.’ Thus it reaches Peirce’s first level of meaning-clarity. A (second-level) verbal definition of the concept is also readily forthcoming: ‘we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.’ But, Peirce announces, we shall need to apply the Pragmatic Maxim if our idea of reality is to be ‘perfectly clear’. At this stage the concept of truth enters the discussion: Peirce claims that the object represented in a true proposition is our best understanding of the real. So we have to turn to his remarks about truth to see how the mind-independence alleged in the abstract definition of reality is to be operationalized and thus properly understood from a pragmatist perspective.