- Length
- 24 pagesThe Essential Peirce, volume 1, Indiana University Press, 1992
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Free onlineA usable out-of-copyright text is freely available
How to Make Our Ideas Clear
Twenty-four pages in a popular magazine, stating a rule for deciding what a concept actually amounts to. It was ignored for two decades, made famous by William James in a form its author rejected, and is the reason this section has a pragmatism group at all.
- Date
- 1878
- Author
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Region
- United States
- Language
- English
- 1879 French, Charles Sanders Peirce Revue philosophique; by the author Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Opens — Starts a line of argument nothing before it was answering
- Form
- Paper
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 29 years
The founding statement of pragmatism, published in a popular magazine, ignored for twenty years, and then made famous by someone its author thought had misunderstood it.
What the book says
A magazine article, published beside popular science journalism, containing the rule that founded American philosophy. Peirce begins with the logicians' account of clear ideas, which he thinks has been repeated without examination since Descartes: an idea is clear when we recognise it wherever it occurs, and distinct when we can give its definition. Both, he argues, are too weak. Familiarity is not understanding, and a definition merely swaps one set of words for another, so a person can hold a perfectly clear and perfectly distinct idea of something and still have no grasp of what it commits them to. His alternative is to ask what difference the idea makes to what we should expect and do. Consider what effects, with conceivable practical bearings, we conceive the object to have - and our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object. Applied to hardness, the question of whether an untested diamond is hard becomes a question about what would happen if it were tested. Applied to reality itself, truth becomes what enquiry would converge on if it were pursued far enough.
What it argues
That the meaning of a conception lies wholly in its conceivable practical consequences, and that this is a test rather than a theory. The point of the rule is diagnostic: run a disputed concept through it, and either a difference in expected experience appears, in which case the dispute is real, or none does, in which case the parties are arguing about words. Peirce is careful that practical does not mean useful - the consequences are what we would conceive to follow, including consequences nobody will ever have occasion to test. Applied to truth and reality the paper reaches its most famous and most contested position: the real is what the community of enquirers would ultimately agree on, so truth is not correspondence to something outside enquiry but the fated end of enquiry itself. That is a claim about the long run and not about what anyone currently believes.
What answered it
James, in 1898 and then at length in 1907, by taking the principle and applying it to truth in a way Peirce thought illegitimate. Dewey took it in a third direction. Russell attacked the resulting doctrine as a confusion between a truth and the evidence for it, and Peirce's own later revisions - which insist that the rule concerns meaning and not truth, and that reality is independent of what any individual thinks - read as a running correction of his followers.
How it argues
By example, briskly, in the register of a magazine rather than a journal. Peirce takes the received doctrine, shows it fails on cases, states his rule in a single sentence, and then works it through hardness, weight, force and finally reality - and the whole thing is over in a couple of dozen pages. The compression is why it was readable enough to be influential and why it has supported a century of disagreement about what it says: several of the positions later attributed to him rest on a paragraph.
The moment
Peirce was working for the United States Coast Survey, making pendulum measurements of gravity, and doing philosophy on the side; he never held a permanent academic post. He had spent the 1860s and 70s on logic and on the mathematics of relations, and the six papers were written for a general audience at the request of the magazine. He was dismissed from his one teaching position at Johns Hopkins in 1884, lived his last decades in rural Pennsylvania in poverty, and left tens of thousands of manuscript pages that are still being edited.
How it travelled
By being rediscovered. The paper attracted almost no attention for twenty years until James named it in a lecture at Berkeley in 1898 and made pragmatism a public movement, at which point Peirce found himself the founder of something he did not recognise. His work then went out of general circulation again for decades, kept alive by a small number of philosophers, and the enormous manuscript remains were published slowly and unreliably from the 1930s. The critical edition begun in the 1980s is still incomplete, which is why almost every general claim about Peirce comes with a caveat about which text is being read.
The strongest objection
That the account of truth cannot survive its own maxim. If the real is what enquiry would ultimately converge on, then the claim rests on a counterfactual about an enquiry nobody will ever complete - and asking what practical difference it makes whether convergence would occur returns no answer, so the maxim applied to Peirce's own conclusion suggests the conclusion is empty. There is a second problem inside it: some questions may have no convergent answer, in which case there is no fact of the matter, which is a strange result to reach by a rule designed to clarify. Peirce's later revisions retreat toward a reality independent of any enquiry, which meets the objection and costs him the distinctive claim. Whether the mature position is a development or an abandonment is the central question in Peirce scholarship.
Why read it
Because it is twenty-four pages, free, written for a general reader, and contains the whole of an idea that took two centuries of philosophy in a new direction. Read The Fixation of Belief first - it is the paper before this one and sets up the problem. Anyone who has read James should read this to see what he was working from.
- First printed
- 1878
- First in English
- 1878
- Digitised
- Yes
The paper is the second of the 1877-78 series; the first, The Fixation of Belief, sets out the four methods of settling opinion that this one presupposes. Peirce revised it substantially in 1893 and again after 1900, and the later versions qualify the account of reality considerably.
Written in English; a French version by Peirce appeared in the Revue philosophique in 1879. The 1878 text is public domain.
Where it stands
Live. The pragmatic maxim is a working instrument in philosophy of science and metaphysics, the convergence account of truth is a standing position, and Peirce's reputation has risen steadily to the point where he is now routinely described as the most original philosopher America has produced.
The passage
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have.
How to Make Our Ideas Clear, Popular Science Monthly, January 1878. Public domain, and the sentence the whole movement descends from.
Contested
Whether James' extension is a legitimate development or a misreading is the founding dispute of pragmatism and Peirce himself gave the answer twice, in opposite tempers. Which text of the paper to cite is a real problem, since the 1893 and post-1900 revisions change the account of reality. Whether the convergence definition is a theory of truth, a criterion, or a regulative assumption about enquiry is argued in all three directions. And the scale of the unpublished remains means Peirce scholarship is still capable of being changed by editing rather than by argument.