ABSTRACT
Emerson was not a pragmatist. The term was not in widespread use until after his death in 1882. William James attributed ‘the pragmatic method…to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences’ to Charles Sanders Peirce in Peirce’s 1878 essay ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’.1 James popularised the term in an address twenty years later.2 Peirce did not deny that he coined ‘pragmatism’, although he was unsure if he or James used it first.3
