In a 1907 letter to FW Frankland, CS Peirce insists that “Pragmatism is not a
doctrine about what the truth of ideas consists in, but about what their meaning
consists in.” Despite this admonishment, prominent commentators on Peirce have
continued to enlist the notion of truth in their explications of the pragmatic maxim.
In The American Pragmatists, for instance, Cheryl Misak tells us that
[Peirce’s] contribution to the debate is to add “a far higher grade” of clarity
to the standard two: knowing what to expect if hypotheses containing the
concept are true. (Misak 30)1
Similarly, Christopher Hookway tells us that pragmatism holds that “propositions
are distinguished by the ‘consequences’ of their being true” (188). Adding that the
maxim is properly clarified “in the subjunctive mood,” Hookway contends that it
directs us to attend to “a general habit of expectation which traces systematic
connections between action and experience if the conception or proposition we are
trying to clarify is true” (189).
2
. Admittedly, such construals of the pragmatic maxim accord well with at least
a few of Peirce’s formulations. For instance, in a manuscript entitled “The
Architectonic Construction of Pragmatism” (CP 1904), Peirce tells us:
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. (CP
5.9)3
