Pragmatic Maxim

[Jon Awbrey]

Pragmatic Maxim • Et Sic Deinceps
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

All,

The pragmatic maxim is a guideline for the practice of inquiry formulated by
Charles Sanders Peirce. Serving as a practical recommendation or regulative
principle in the normative science of logic, its function is to guide the
conduct of thought toward the achievement of its purpose, advising the
addressee on an optimal way of “attaining clearness of apprehension”.

Regards,

Jon

cc: https://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
cc: https://mathstodon.xyz/@Inquiry/110854857966219596

[Jon Awbrey]

Pragmatic Maxim • Introduction
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

All,

The “pragmatic maxim”, also known as the “maxim of pragmatism”
or the “maxim of pragmaticism”, is a maxim of logic formulated

by Charles Sanders Peirce. Serving as a practical recommendation
or regulative principle in the normative science of logic, its
function is to guide the conduct of thought toward the achievement
of its purpose, advising the addressee on an optimal way of “attaining
clearness of apprehension”.

Charles Sanders Peirce
• https://mywikibiz.com/Charles_Sanders_Peirce

Normative Science
• https://mywikibiz.com/Normative_science

[Jon Awbrey]

Seven Ways of Looking at a Pragmatic Maxim • 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

All,

Peirce stated the pragmatic maxim in many different ways
over the years, each of which adds its own bit of clarity
or correction to their collective corpus.

The first excerpt appears in the form of a dictionary entry,
intended as a definition of pragmatism.

<QUOTE CSP:>

❝Pragmatism. The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up
by the application of the following maxim for attaining clearness of
apprehension:

❝Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings,
we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception
of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.❞

(Peirce, CP 5.2, 1878/1902).

</QUOTE>

[Jon Awbrey]

Seven Ways of Looking at a Pragmatic Maxim • 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

All,

The second excerpt presents another version of the pragmatic maxim,
a recommendation about a way of clarifying meaning that can be taken
to stake out the general philosophy of pragmatism.

<QUOTE CSP:>

❝Pragmaticism was originally enounced in the form of a maxim, as follows:

❝Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive
the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is
the whole of your conception of the object.

❝I will restate this in other words, since ofttimes one can thus eliminate some
unsuspected source of perplexity to the reader. This time it shall be in the
indicative mood, as follows:

❝The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all
general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible
different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the
symbol.❞

(Peirce, CP 5.438, 1878/1905).

[Jon Awbrey]

Seven Ways of Looking at a Pragmatic Maxim • 3
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

All,

The third excerpt puts a gloss on the meaning of a practical bearing
and provides an alternative statement of the maxim.

<QUOTE CSP:>

❝Such reasonings and all reasonings turn upon the idea that if one exerts
certain kinds of volition, one will undergo in return certain compulsory
perceptions. Now this sort of consideration, namely, that certain lines
of conduct will entail certain kinds of inevitable experiences is what is
called a “practical consideration”. Hence is justified the maxim, belief
in which constitutes pragmatism; namely:

❝In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should
consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity
from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will
constitute the entire meaning of the conception.❞

(Peirce, CP 5.9, 1905).

[Jon Awbrey]

Seven Ways of Looking at a Pragmatic Maxim • 4
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

All,

The fourth excerpt illustrates one of Peirce's many attempts
to get the sense of the pragmatic philosophy across by rephrasing
the pragmatic maxim in an alternative way. 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 full-grown philosophy.

<QUOTE CSP:>

❝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:

❝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.❞

(Peirce, CP 5.18, 1903).

[Jon Awbrey]

Seven Ways of Looking at a Pragmatic Maxim • 5
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

All,

The fifth excerpt is useful by way of additional clarification,
and was aimed to correct a variety of historical misunderstandings
that arose over time with regard to the intended meaning of the
pragmatic maxim.

<QUOTE CSP:>

❝The doctrine appears to assume that the end of man is action —
a stoical axiom which, to the present writer at the age of sixty,
does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty. If it
be admitted, on the contrary, that action wants an end, and that
that end must be something of a general description, then the spirit
of the maxim itself, which is that we must look to the upshot of our
concepts in order rightly to apprehend them, would direct us towards
something different from practical facts, namely, to general ideas,
as the true interpreters of our thought.❞

(Peirce, CP 5.3, 1902).

[Jon Awbrey]

Seven Ways of Looking at a Pragmatic Maxim • 6
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

All,

A sixth excerpt is useful in stating the bearing of the pragmatic maxim on
the topic of reflection, namely, that it makes all of pragmatism boil down
to nothing more or less than a method of reflection.

<QUOTE CSP:>

❝The study of philosophy consists, therefore, in reflexion, and pragmatism
is that method of reflexion which is guided by constantly holding in view
its purpose and the purpose of the ideas it analyzes, whether these ends
be of the nature and uses of action or of thought. … It will be seen that
pragmatism is not a Weltanschauung but is a method of reflexion having for
its purpose to render ideas clear.❞

(Peirce, CP 5.13 note 1, 1902).

[Jon Awbrey]

Seven Ways of Looking at a Pragmatic Maxim • 7
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

All,

The seventh excerpt is a late reflection on the reception of pragmatism.

With a sense of exasperation that is almost palpable, Peirce tries
to justify the maxim of pragmatism and to correct its misreadings by
pinpointing a number of false impressions that the intervening years
have piled on it, and he attempts once more to prescribe against the
deleterious effects of these mistakes. Recalling the very conception
and birth of pragmatism, he reviews its initial promise and its intended
lot in the light of its subsequent vicissitudes and its apparent fate.

Adopting the style of a post mortem analysis, he presents a veritable autopsy
of the ways that the main idea of pragmatism, for all its practicality, can be
murdered by a host of misdissecting disciplinarians, by what are ostensibly its
most devoted followers.

<QUOTE CSP:>

❝This employment five times over of derivates of concipere must then have had
a purpose. In point of fact it had two. One was to show that I was speaking
of meaning in no other sense than that of intellectual purport. The other was
to avoid all danger of being understood as attempting to explain a concept by
percepts, images, schemata, or by anything but concepts. I did not, therefore,
mean to say that acts, which are more strictly singular than anything, could
constitute the purport, or adequate proper interpretation, of any symbol.
I compared action to the finale of the symphony of thought, belief being
a demicadence. Nobody conceives that the few bars at the end of a musical
movement are the purpose of the movement. They may be called its upshot.❞

(Peirce, CP 5.402 note 3, 1906).

[Jon Awbrey]

Pragmatic Maxim • References, Readings, Resources
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

References —

Peirce, C.S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–6,
Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.), vols. 7–8, Arthur W. Burks (ed.),
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1931–1935, 1958. Cited as CP n.m
for volume n, paragraph m.

Readings —

Awbrey, Jon, and Awbrey, Susan (1995),
“Interpretation as Action • The Risk of Inquiry”,
Inquiry : Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 15(1), 40–52.

Archive
• https://web.archive.org/web/20001210162300/http://chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html
Journal
• https://www.pdcnet.org/inquiryct/content/inquiryct_1995_0015_0001_0040_0052
Online
• https://www.academia.edu/57812482/Interpretation_as_Action_The_Risk_of_Inquiry

Resources —

Bergman and Paavola (eds.) • Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms
• http://www.commens.org/dictionary

Pragmatic Maxim
• http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/maxim-of-pragmatism
Pragmaticism
• http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/pragmaticism
Pragmatism
• http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/pragmatism