Seven Ways of Looking at a Pragmatic Maxim • 5
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/08/07/pragmatic-maxim-2/

The fifth excerpt is useful by way of additional clarification, and was aimed to correct a variety of historical misunderstandings that arose over time with regard to the intended meaning of the pragmatic maxim.

❝The doctrine appears to assume that the end of man is action — a stoical axiom which, to the present writer at the age of sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at thirty. If it be admitted, on the contrary, that action wants an end, and that that end must be something of a general description, then the spirit of the maxim itself, which is that we must look to the upshot of our concepts in order rightly to apprehend them, would direct us towards something different from practical facts, namely, to general ideas, as the true interpreters of our thought.❞

(Peirce, CP 5.3, 1902).

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