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Peirce's “Pragmatic” Method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

W. H. Hill
W. H. Hill*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Charles Sanders Peirce, who contributed the term pragmatism to the language of philosophy, insisted always that the term was intended to designate a method. Pragmatism, he warned, is not a Weltanschauung, nor a doctrine of metaphysics, nor even an “attempt to determine any truth of things.” It is simply a method of ascertaining meanings, of making them clear, and of pointing a way for the successful determination of the truth of things. Peirce's practice consistently belied his preaching in this regard, for his exposition of the method involved a metaphysical system of considerable scope; and this, it seems to me, was unavoidable. Yet it was as a method that Peirce first presented his distinctive point of view, and it is primarily as a method that I wish to consider it here. Into metaphysics, or Weltanschauung, we shall surely be led; despite Peirce's pronouncement, I make no apology for that.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , April 1940 , pp. 168 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1940

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References

1 “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12, pp. 1-15, 286-302. The papers are reprinted in their original form in Chance, Love, and Logic, edited by M. R. Cohen (New York, 1923). In the Collected Papers of Peirce, edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, Vol. V (Cambridge, 1934), a later text appears, with revisions and notes added by Peirce.

2 Collected Papers, 5.465 (Volume 5, Paragraph 465).

3 Ibid., 5.375.

4 Ibid., 5.383.

5 “But which, on the other hand,” as Peirce says in a note added later to the text, “unceasingly tends to influence thought; or in other words, by something Real.” Ibid., 5.384.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., 5.396-398, 400.

8 Ibid., 5.401.

9 Ibid., 5.402.

10 North American Review, Vol. 113, 1871, pp. 449-472.

11 Collected Papers, 5.406.

12 Ibid. 5.407.

13 Ibid., note 1.

14 Ibid., 5.408.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., Vol. V, p. 223, note.

17 Ibid., 6.25.

18 Ibid., 6.192.

19 Ibid., 6.61.

20 Ibid., 6.341.

21 Ibid., 1.420, 5.105.

22 Ibid., 1.27.

23 North American Review, Vol. 113, p. 455.

24 Collected Papers, 5.173.

25 Ibid., 5.107, 119.

26 His argument for God was published in the Hibbert Journal in 1908; it is reprinted with additions in the Collected Papers, Volume VI, Book II, Chapters 3 and 4.

27 Collected Papers, 6.496, 502.

28 Ibid., 6.476.

29 Ibid., 6.484.

30 Ibid., 6.501, 503.

31 Ibid., 6.488-491.

32 Ibid., 5.383.