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Directory talk:Jon Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry Driven Systems : Part 5 (view source)
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The fourth excerpt illustrates one of Peirce's many attempts to get the sense of the pragmatic POV across by rephrasing the pragmatic maxim in an alternative way (PM<sub>4</sub>). In introducing this version, he addresses an order of prospective critics who do not deem a simple heuristic maxim, much less one that concerns itself with a routine matter of logical procedure, as forming a sufficient basis for a whole philosophy.
The fourth excerpt illustrates one of Peirce's many attempts to get the sense
of the pragmatic POV across by rephrasing the pragmatic maxim in an alternative
way (PM_4). In introducing this version, he addresses an order of prospective
critics who do not deem a simple heuristic maxim, much less one that concerns
itself with a routine matter of logical procedure, as forming a sufficient
basis for a whole philosophy.
| On their side, one of the faults that I think they might find with me is that
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<p>On their side, one of the faults that I think they might find with me is that I make pragmatism to be a mere maxim of logic instead of a sublime principle of speculative philosophy. In order to be admitted to better philosophical standing I have endeavored to put pragmatism as I understand it into the same form of a philosophical theorem. I have not succeeded any better than this:</p>
<p>Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood.</p>
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| align="right" | (Peirce, CP 5.18, 1903).
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I am including Peirce's preamble to his restatement of the principle because I think that the note of irony and the foreshadowing of comedy intimated by it are important to understanding the gist of what follows. In this rendition the statement of the principle of pragmatism is recast in a partially self-referent fashion, and since it is itself delivered as a "theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood" the full content of its own deeper meaning is something that remains to be unwrapped, precisely through a self-application to its own expression of the very principle it expresses. To wit, this statement, the form of whose phrasing is forced by conventional biases to take on the style of a declarative judgment, describes itself as a "confused form of thought", in need of being amended, converted, and translated into its operational interpretant, that is to say, its viable pragmatic equivalent.
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The fifth excerpt, PM_5, is useful by way of additional clarification,
The fifth excerpt, PM_5, is useful by way of additional clarification,
and was aimed to correct a variety of historical misunderstandings that
and was aimed to correct a variety of historical misunderstandings that