Beyond Clearness and Distinctness
Logic textbooks inherited two grades of understanding from Descartes and Leibniz: an idea is clear when we recognize it wherever we meet it, distinct when we can define it abstractly. Peirce finds both grades feeble — familiarity is no test at all, and definition merely rearranges words. His essay proposes a third and higher grade of clearness, reached by asking what a belief commits us to do.
The Maxim
Belief, Peirce has already argued, is a habit of action. Two beliefs that would issue in exactly the same conduct under every conceivable circumstance are one belief in two dresses. From this the maxim follows almost by itself:
Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
What the Maxim Does
Applied to “hard,” the maxim yields: there is no fact of hardness apart from what would happen if we tried to scratch it. Applied to “force,” it dissolves a century of metaphysical debate about whether force is a real entity: force is what its effects are, and to ask for more is to ask for nothing. Applied to “reality” itself, it gives Peirce his famous definition — the real is that which inquiry, pursued long enough by a community of investigators, is fated to agree upon. Meaning is public, future-directed, and testable: the whole of twentieth-century pragmatism unfolds from this paragraph.
From “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly, January 1878 — the essay William James later credited as the birthplace of pragmatism.
Related Concepts
