Pragmaticism

He [the writer] framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life. . . .

[5] Peirce (CP 5.11-12), like James[6] saw pragmatism as embodying familiar attitudes, in philosophy and elsewhere, elaborated into a new deliberate method of thinking and resolving dilemmas.

Peirce differed from James and the early John Dewey, in some of their tangential enthusiasms, in being decidedly more rationalistic and realistic, in several senses of those terms, throughout the preponderance of his own philosophical moods.

In a 1906 manuscript,[7] Peirce wrote that, in the Metaphysical Club decades earlier, Nicholas St. John Greenoften urged the importance of applying Bain's definition of belief, as "that upon which a man is prepared to act."

His pragmatism is a method for fruitfully sorting out conceptual confusions caused, for example, by distinctions that make (sometimes needful) formal yet not practical differences.

In clearness's second grade (the "nominal" grade), he defines truth as the correspondence of a sign (in particular, a proposition) to its object, and the real as the object (be it a possibility or quality, or an actuality or brute fact, or a necessity or norm or law) to which a true sign corresponds, such that truth and the real are independent of that which you or I or any actual, definite community of inquirers think.

After that needful but confined step, next in clearness's third grade (the pragmatic, practice-oriented grade) he defines truth — not as actual consensus, such that to inquire would be to poll the experts — but as that which would be reached, sooner or later but still inevitably, by research taken far enough, such that the real does depend on that ideal final opinion—a dependence to which he appeals in theoretical arguments elsewhere, for instance for the long-run validity of the rule of induction.

[11] (Peirce held that one cannot have absolute theoretical assurance of having actually reached the truth, and later said that the confession of inaccuracy and one-sidedness is an essential ingredient of a true abstract statement.

The fuller excerpt below supports her case further: [The] word "pragmatism" has gained general recognition in a generalised sense that seems to argue power of growth and vitality.

The famed psychologist, James, first took it up, seeing that his "radical empiricism" substantially answered to the writer's definition of pragmatism, albeit with a certain difference in the point of view.

So then, the writer, finding his bantling "pragmatism" so promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word "pragmaticism", which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.

[20]Then, in a surviving draft letter to Calderoni, dated by the CP editors as circa that same year 1905, Peirce said regarding his above-quoted discussion: In the April number of the Monist I proposed that the word 'pragmatism' should hereafter be used somewhat loosely to signify affiliation with Schiller, James, Dewey, Royce, and the rest of us, while the particular doctrine which I invented the word to denote, which is your first kind of pragmatism, should be called 'pragmaticism.'

However, in the following year 1906, in a manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critics",[22] Peirce wrote: I have always fathered my pragmaticism (as I have called it since James and Schiller made the word [pragmatism] imply "the will to believe," the mutability of truth, the soundness of Zeno's refutation of motion, and pluralism generally), upon Kant, Berkeley, and Leibniz.

Then, in 1908, in his article "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God",[1] mentioning both James and the journalist, pragmatist, and literary author Giovanni Papini, Peirce wrote: In 1871, in a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Mass., I used to preach this principle as a sort of logical gospel, representing the unformulated method followed by Berkeley, and in conversation about it I called it "Pragmatism."

In December 1877 and January 1878 I set forth the doctrine in the Popular Science Monthly, and the two parts[23] of my essay were printed in French in the Revue Philosophique, volumes vi.

About the time Professor Papini discovered, to the delight of the Pragmatist school, that this doctrine was incapable of definition,[24] which would certainly seem to distinguish it from every other doctrine in whatever branch of science, I was coming to the conclusion that my poor little maxim should be called by another name; and accordingly, in April 1905, I renamed it Pragmaticism.Peirce proceeded in "A Neglected Argument" to express both deep satisfaction and deep dismay with his fellow pragmatists.

[27] In another manuscript "A Sketch of Logical Critic" dated by the CP editors as 1911,[28] Peirce discussed one of Zeno's paradoxes, that of Achilles and the Tortoise, in terms of James's and others' difficulties with it.

But owing to his almost unexampled incapacity for mathematical thought, combined with intense hatred for logic — probably for its pedantry, its insistence on minute exactitude — the gêne of its barbarous formulations, etc.

Baldwin, arrived at J in his dictionary, suddenly calls on me to do the rest of the logic, in the utmost haste, and various questions of terminology come up.Who originated the term pragmatism, I or you?

What do you understand by it?to which James replied (CP 8:253 footnote 8) on a post card dated November 26, 1900, Widener Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts) VB2a: You invented 'pragmatism' for which I gave you full credit in a lecture entitled 'Philosophical conceptions and practical results' of which I sent you 2 (unacknowledged) copies a couple of years ago.In an article for "The Monist" for 1905, Mr. Peirce says that he "has used it continually in philosophical conversation since, perhaps, the mid-seventies."