The paper examines questions discussed by Andrew Stables in J Philos Edu 48(4):591–603, 2014 and presents reasons why Peirce founded his philosophical edifice on semiotic principles to which several traditional dichotomies are not applicable. Peirce was neither a rationalist nor an empiricist, although, in a way, he may have been both. Other dichotomies that cannot be applied to his semiotic philosophy are the ones of idealism vs. realism and the one of the rational vs. the emotional. The paper then discusses Peirce’s objections against the rationalists and asks why Peirce considered himself, and has been defined by others, an “objective idealist”. With respect to the question whether it can be doubted that Peirce was a fully semiotic philosopher, the paper argues that semioticians of the twenty-first century should recognize that semiotics is a pluralist endeavor but should not try to adopt principles from divergent or even incompatible schools of semiotics. Semiotics should not be conceived as a “unified science”, as which Charles W. Morris envisioned it in 1937.