 Descartes, of course, might have conceded this, but responded that the revision is required because once we allow error to enter our belief-corpus we may be unable to escape from its damaging effects. His was a time of methodological ferment, and he appreciated how many false beliefs he himself had acquired from his teachers. The pragmatist response here is to question some of Descartes’ assumptions about how we reason and form beliefs. First, his strategy is individualist and ‘to make single individuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious’. Peirce noted that the natural sciences which were so conspicuously successful in Descartes’ day took a very different approach: