 In his two essays that founded pragmatism as a philosophical movement, Peirce argued that the experimental methods of the natural sciences provided the proper the model for philosophical inquiry. He understood the scientific method to be opposed to the methods used in traditional metaphysics which were identified by him with Cartesian rationalism and rationalist intuitionism. Further, Peirce’s account of the nature of “belief” could be interpreted as leading to a complete rejection of all metaphysical hypotheses on the ground that, as they are not verifiable by the methods of scientific inquiry, metaphysical beliefs were properly considered “meaningless gibberish.”