The Pragmatic Maxim

The pragmatic maxim, in Peirce's mature formulation, holds that to understand what a concept means, consider what effects the objects falling under that concept would have in the full range of conceivable practical situations, and the sum of those effects exhausts the concept's meaning. The maxim is not a theory of truth. It is a method of clarification — a tool for stripping away verbal confusion and revealing whether a concept that seems to say something actually says anything at all, or merely produces a warm feeling of comprehension without determinate content. Peirce later renamed his doctrine pragmaticism — "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers" — to distinguish it from William James's looser versions. Pragmaticism is not the doctrine that ideas are valuable insofar as useful; it is the doctrine that meaning is constituted by practical consequences, and that concepts specifying no determinate consequences are, however eloquent, meaningless.