To the extent that William James had an account of ‘meaning,’ it is best captured in his “pragmatic maxim”, but James’s maxim has notoriously been open to many conflicting interpretations. It will be argued here that some of these interpretive difficulties stem from the fact that (1) James seriously understates the differences between his own views and those presented by Peirce in “How to Make our Ideas Clear”, and (2) James’s understanding of the maxim typically ties meaning to truth, but (...) since James takes “truth” talk to stretch from “temporary” to “absolute” truth, a similar ‘elasticity’ can be found in his conception of meaning. However, this ‘elasticity’ is found in our everyday talk of meaning as well, and James manages to capture it in a more cohesive way than more contemporary accounts that often try to do so by positing two completely distinct types of meaning or content. (shrink)

Peirce believed that his pragmaticism can be conclusively proven. Beginning in 1903, he drafted several attempts, ending by 1908 with a semeiotic proof. Around 1905, he exposes the proof using the theory of Existential Graphs . This paper modernizes the semantics Peirce proposed for EGs in terms of game-theoretic semantics . Peirce's 1905 proof is then reconstructed in three parts, by relating pragmaticism to the GTS conception of meaning, showing that Peirce's proof is an argument for a relational structure of (...) the meaning of intellectual signs that our interpretative and strategic practices give rise to, and bringing out the key links between EGs and pragmaticism. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to apply Charles S. Peirce's pragmatic method to establishing if proponents of transcendental arguments could hold the conclusions of their arguments to be fallibly known. I will thus propose a pragmatic clarification of the concepts of a priority, necessity, and infallibility in order to ascertain if these concepts are unavoidably related or not. I will argue that an a priori knowable necessary proposition is not in principle indubitable, whereas a proposition infallibly known is so. (...) Finally, I will apply these reflections to transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

Mark Johnston claims the pragmatist theory of truth is inconsistent with the way we actually employ and talk about that concept. He is, however, sympathetic enough to attempt to rescue its respectable core using ‘response-dependence’, a revisionary form of which he advocates as a method for clarifying various philosophically significant concepts. But Johnston has misrepresented pragmatism; it does not require rescuing, and as I show here, his ‘missing explanation argument’ against pragmatism therefore fails. What Johnston and other critics including Putnam (...) have overlooked is the distinctive nature of the pragmatist strategy, specifically, that it is non-reductive, a characteristic it shares with a more promising form of response-dependence; what Johnston calls ‘Descriptive Protagoreanism’ (DP). In this paper I offer a defence of pragmatism and show how it might be re-articulated as a form of DP. (shrink)