Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim:

Abstract

The purpose of my talk this evening * is to convince you that American pragmatism is not to be simply identified with positivism. By positivism I understand a rather extreme form of nominalism which developed along the lines of classical empiricism. By nominalism I understand any philosophical doctrine which denies the reality of general ideas as part of the ontological structure of things. A nominalistics view of reality makes of it nothing but a set of actual entities each of which is a discrete « absolute » and between which there are no real connections. Such a world is devoid of qualities and of causal relations. It is a world about which only statements of actual contingent fact can be made. To it no necessary statements apply since they are all nothing but logical truths. Admittedly this is an incomplete characterization of positivism but it is sufficient for our purpose since these essential notes of that form of nomnalism are what I intend to deny of pragmatism as developed by Charles S. Peirce. Let it also be said immediately that certain forms of classical rationalism are also nominalisfcic and hve developted into a form of positivism all their own. The rationalism of Descartes, with its emphasis upon intuition of clear and distinct ideas ultimately makes of the world a set of discrete, absolute and actual entities. The only difference between the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Locke or Hume is that for the former the ultimate building-blocks are abstract ideas while for the latter they are sense data. Both, however,