ABSTRACT
Peirce’s writings on his pragmatism, the doctrine for which he is most famous, fall into two groups. Although he did not use the term in print, his writings of the 1870s introduce the doctrine and provide arguments for it and illustrations of its applications. This early discussion culminates on ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’, which was discussed in chapter II. When William James publicly defended his own pragmatism for the first time in 1898, he attributed the doctrine to Peirce and referred to this 1878 paper. Peirce himself discussed the doctrine again after 1900, As well as the Pragmatism lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1903 (5.14-212), and three articles representing an unfinished attempt to prove the doctrine in The Monist in 1905-namely ‘What Pragmatism Is’ (5.411-437), ‘Issues of Pragmaticism’ (5.438-463), ‘Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism’ (4.411-463)—there is an enormous amount of manuscript material, some published in volume five of the Collected Papers. This return to the doctrine was partly a response to the notoriety that James had won for pragmatism through his 1898 lecture and subsequent publications. (For some of the chronology, see Fisch, 1977.) Peirce was both anxious to exploit his new fame as the originator of pragmatism to obtain more recognition of his own views, and annoyed at the pale copy of his own position that was popularly associated with the term ‘pragmatism’. He constantly stressed that his position was distinct from that of James or Schiller; he denounced their nominalism; and he claimed that his doctrine alone was susceptible of a rigorous philosophical proof. Irritated that his term was used to refer to an alien doctrine, he proposed to use the term ‘pragmaticism’ to refer to his particular version of pragmatism, claiming that this term at least was ‘ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers’ (5.414). As we noted in chapter II, he claimed to have long doubted the truth of pragmatism because he thought that, in his 1878 paper, he erected it upon psychologistic foundations. The nonpsychologistic proof that he continually promised was the culmination of the attempt to provide new objective foundations for logic and the normative sciences which was introduced in chapter II, and which has been discussed at length.
