How did Peirce connect truth with long-term scientific inquiry?

For Charles Sanders Peirce, truth is defined as the ideal limit toward which scientific inquiry is destined to converge in the "infinite long run".1

Peirce connected truth to this long-term process by positing that if a community of investigators were to engage in continuous, systematic inquiry, their collective assent to a belief would eventually increase while dissent would decrease. He famously stated:1

The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.2

In this framework, truth is not a static property but an imagined ideal endpoint of ongoing experimentation and theorizing. Because scientific thought is purposive, Peirce’s definition implies that meaning itself carries a reference to the future. This perspective emphasizes the social nature of knowledge, framing the community of inquirers as an ideal of rational democracy.21