Appendix

THE BEGINNING OF PRAGMATISM AND 'PRAGMATISM'

PEIRCE CLAIMS TO HAVE USED THE WORD "PRAGMATISM" in philosophical conversations from the mid-'seventies on, to designate his theory of be• lief, and, although he explained the main elements of his pragmatic theory of meaning in the two articles published in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877 and 1878, he still did not dare to use the word "prag• matism" in print until 1902. He used it then only in response to a spe• cial request, in Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, under the heading "Pragmatism" (5.414n; 5.1-4). In preparing to write the articles for Baldwin, Peirce wrote to James on November 10, 1900: "Who originated the term pragmatism, I or you? Where did it first appear in print? What do you understand by it?" And on a postcard dated November 26, 1900 James replied: "You invented 'pragmatism' for which I gave you full credit in a lecture entitled 'Philosophical con• ceptions and practical results' of which I sent you 2 (unacknowledged) copies a couple of years ago" (8.253). The lecture to which James refers was his famous paper delivered in 1898 at the University of California, wherein he presented his views of pragmatism. James' understanding of pragmatism was so different from Peirce's that the latter, to avoid ambiguity, devised a n ew term "pragmaticism" to describe his doctrine, in an article in The Monist in 1905. "The writer, finding his bantling 'pragmatism' so promoted, feels 147 148 PEIRCE's THEORY OF SCIENTIFIC METIIOD that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word 'pragmaticism,' which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers" (5.414). It is noteworthy that, in the brief carefully written article in Bald• win's Dictionary, Peirce quotes the pragmatic maxim verbatim from "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," and mentions that the article is the first published description of his theory of pragmatism (5.2f). Again, about 1905, Peirce wrote that the original statement of pragmatism, the last-mentioned article, was completed in September 1877 aboard a steamer, "a day or two before reaching Plymouth, nothing remaining to . be done except to translate it into English" (5.526n ). The article was first written in French (5.358n). In 1905 Peirce acknowledged in The Monist that he invented the word "pragmatism,'' which he derived from Kant's pragmatisch to ex• press a "relation to some definite human purpose" (5.412). About 1906 Peirce wrote of the ancestry of the doctrine of pragma• tism, of The Metaphysical Club, where pragmatism was born, and of Bain's definition of belief from which "pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary." In the same place he also makes mention of a little paper which he wrote for the members of the club, setting forth some of his opinions "that I had been urging all along under the name of pragma• tism." The members responded so enthusiastically that he "was encour• aged, some half dozen years later, on the invitation of the great pub• lisher Mr. W. H. Appleton, to insert it, somewhat expanded, in the Popular Science Monthly for November, 1877 and January, 1878 .... The same paper appeared the next year in a French redaction in the Revue Philosophique (Vol. VI, 1878, p. 553; Vol. VII, 1879, p. 39)" (5.12f). Arthur W. Burks, editor of the seventh and eighth volumes of the Collected Papers, thinks it probable that some of the manuscripts form• ing 7.313-361 may have composed the little paper that Peirce describes above. Some of these manuscripts, as Burks reports, are dated 1873, and others were most likely written around 1872 or 1873. They contain some of the prominent themes of the articles published in the Popular Science Monthly-for example, the nature of doubt, belief, and investi• gation, the relation of belief to action, the need of genuine doubt as a PRAGMATISM AND 'PRAGMATISM' 149 condition of learning, some erroneous methods of settling opinion, and the importance of both observation and the pragmatic method of meaning. Burks also notes that Wiliiam James in a letter of November 24, 1872, to his brother Henry wrote: "Charles Peirce . . . read us an ad• mirable introductory chapter to his book on logic the other day" (Perry, Thought and Character, I, 332 [7.313n1]). Besides the manuscripts mentioned above, there are a few other fore• shadowings of the doctrine of the mid-'seventies, but they are undevel• oped and fragmentary in comparison with the two articles. See 5.238- 242; 5.264--268; 8.16. Again, in his famous "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," published in the Hibbert Journal in 1908, Peirce refers to the existence of The Metaphysical Club in Cambridge as the birthplace of the theory of pragmatism, and asserts that the doctrine can trace its origin, in some way, to Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, and even back to Soc• rates ( 6.482; 6.490). The influence of the English psychologist Alexander Bain on the origin of pragmatism has been described by Max Fisch ("Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmatism," Journal of the History of Ideas, XV [1954], 413-444). Murphey lists several reasons why Bain's ideas should have attracted Peirce in the early 'seventies: the doubt• belief-inquiry theory, the realistic response to Hume, and the evolu• tionary approach to belief as adjustive habits (Murphey, Development, pp. 160-163). Arthur C. Lovejoy in his classic article "The Thirteen Pragmatisms" points out the various nuances in the understanding of pragmatism during the early years of the century. He does not, however, always identify their defenders (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, V [1908], 5-12 and 29-39; the article is reprinted in Arthur C. Lovejoy, The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963]).