ABSTRACT
Pragmatism was introduced to society in a lecture given by William James1 to the Philosophical Union at the University of California in Berkeley on 26 August 1898.2 In his lecture James acknowledged that this brainchild was that of his friend Charles S.Peirce, and that Peirce had first introduced him to it in the early 1870s ([13.11], 410). The child had not been appropriately christened-James indicated a preference for ‘practicalism’—and needed ‘to be expressed more broadly than Mr. Peirce expresse[d] it’, but it offered ‘the clue or compass’ by which James believed ‘we may keep our feet’ on ‘the trail of truth’ (412).
