How Pragmatic are the Examples in Peirce's Illustrations?

Mathias Girel (1)

1 La République des savoirs : Lettres, Sciences, Philosophie

The ‚proof‛ of pragmatism, and in general the idea that the relevance of the pragmatist maxim had to be ‚proved‛, is a vexed question, and one should be cautious, here, before embarking into its treatment: Christopher Hookway has devoted a long series of papers to this very question and they often involve the consideration of minute details in Peirce's late writings2. I will content myself here with a puzzle that comes before, if I'm right: scholars have long taken for granted that Peirce had applied, within a new logical and metaphysical context, Bain's doctrine that a belief was a preparedness to act and that this application provided the core of Peirce's first pragmatism. I think that even in the first texts, that is not exactly true and that, contrariwise to what is often held, dispositions to act don't play such an obvious role in the Illustrations of the Logic of Science. To put it in a nutshell, It is not clear whether Peirce's examples are actually, at that time, pragmatic examples. The first section provides a tentative roadmap to assess the sundry dimensions of Peirce's Pragmatism in the 1870s, the second deals with the alleged role of dispositionalism in How to Make our Ideas Clear, the third one provides some contextual elements that might account for the ‚outburst‛ of dispositionalism in 1878.

Mots clés: Dispositions; Inquiry; Belief; Reality; Pragmatism (Proof of); Peirce; Helmholtz; Clifford

Domaines: Philosophie

Mathias Girel. How Pragmatic are the Examples in Peirce's Illustrations?. 2015. ⟨hal-01394893⟩