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The first grade of clarity about a concept is to have an unreflective grasp of it in everyday experience. Peirce introduces this principle, which we shall discuss in detail below as the third grade of clarity, as a development of the rationalist notion of “clear and distinct ideas.” Combining his pragmatic maxim with notions of clarity from Descartes and Leibniz, Peirce identifies three grades of clarity or understanding. The earliest clear statement of Peirce’s pragmatism comes from his 1878 paper “How To Make Our Ideas Clear.” In this paper, Peirce introduces a maxim, or principle, which allows us to achieve the highest grade of clarity about the concepts we use. Clearly, then, there are two strands to Peirce’s pragmatism: his early statements of the 1870’s and his later work from around the turn of the twentieth century. Peirce returned repeatedly to his early formulations and especially in his later life and worked and re-worked his pragmatic theories, particularly in reaction to the work of William James. However, what Peirce did in the 1870s was to create the first clear formulation of pragmatism as a principle of inquiry and account of meaning.
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Peirce in particular saw traces of the theory in the work of Kant. Both Peirce and James took pragmatism to have its roots in older work than Peirce’s late nineteenth century theory. This early body of work on pragmatism influenced William James who, some twenty years later, publicly declared for the doctrine, named Peirce as its originator, and made the theory common philosophical knowledge.
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CHARLES PIERCE VERIFICATION
Peirce made his first published attempts at formulating pragmatism in the 1870s, and the maxim he developed there is often regarded as a prototype of the verification principle proposed by logical positivists in the early twentieth century. The most widely known feature of Peirce’s philosophy is his account of pragmatism. Peirce and James: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism.
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