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Mathias Girel, « Pragmatic clarifications and dispositions in Peirce’s How to Make our Ideas Clear », HAL-SHS : philosophie, ID : 10.23925/2316-5278
The “proof” of pragmatism, and, in general, the idea that therelevance of the pragmatist maxim had to be “proved”, is a vexed question.One should be cautious before considering it. Christopher Hookway hasdevoted a book to this very question and the arguments often involvethe consideration of minute details in Peirce’s late writings, well beyondthe scope of the present paper. I will content myself, here, with a puzzlethat comes before, logically and chronologically: scholars have long takenfor granted that Peirce applied, within a new logical and metaphysicalcontext, Bain’s doctrine that a belief was a “preparedness to act” and thatthis application provided the core of Peirce’s first pragmatism. I think thateven in the first texts, that is not exactly true, and contrariwise to whatis often held, dispositions to act do not play such an obvious role in theIllustrations of the Logic of Science. To put it in a nutshell, it is not clearwhether Peirce’s examples were actually, at that time, pragmatic examples.The first section of this paper provides a tentative roadmap to assess thesundry dimensions of Peirce’s Pragmatism in the 1870s, the second dealswith the alleged role of dispositionalism in How to Make our Ideas Clear(hereinafter referred to as HMIC), the third one provides some contextualelements that might account for the “outburst” of dispositionalism in 1878.