INTRODUCTION

“Who originated the term pragmatism, I or you? Where did it first appear in print? What do you understand by it?” Charles Peirce asked his friend William James in a letter on November 10, 1900 (CP 8.253; Perry 1935/1936: II, 407 n5). On November 26, 1900, James replied: “You invented 'pragmatism' for which I gave you full credit in a lecture entitled 'Philosophical conceptions and practical results.'” The published version of that lecture (1898) is very likely to have been the first place where the term “pragmatism” was used in print, and James was the first philosopher known as a pragmatist. The pragmatist movement was largely developed by James, although Dewey, Royce, and even Schiller may have had an original and independent role to play in its formation. Nonetheless, James referred to Peirce's earlier unpublished usage of the term and acknowledged Peirce as the first to formulate a pragmatistic doctrine in the discussions of the Cambridge “Metaphysical Club” in the early 1870s.