Essential Peirce, vol. 2:
Many versions of a text titled “The Basis of Pragmaticism” are extant; they were written over a period of nine months starting in August 1905, and they were all meant to become Peirce’s third Monist paper. The present text is Peirce’s fifth attempt, probably written in December 1905. The words “in Phaneroscopy” have been added to the title of this version.] Peirce’s original plan for this series of articles called for the third one to present the proof of pragmaticism. In this selection and the one that follows, Peirce lays the foundation on which to erect his proof (but he later decided that his best case needed to be made with the Existential Graphs). His preliminary efforts offer important insights as to how deeply pragmaticism is embedded in his system of philosophy. The basis for pragmaticism that Peirce develops here is his phaneroscopy and the doctrine of the valency of concepts that derives from it. Peirce explains why it makes sense to expect that experience will exhibit only three “indecomposable elements,” and offers an abbreviated proof of his reduction thesis. This article well exhibits Peirce’s intention to do what he can to make philosophy a science, toward which end it is necessary to “abandon all endeavor to make it literary.” Still, Peirce concludes this draft with a poetic characterization of the crucial interplay between the world of fancy, the rudeness of experience, and our “garment of contentment and of habituation.”

Robin Catalogue:
908. [The Categories]
A. MS., n.p., n.d., pp. 2-20, 6-8.
A deduction of the Categories. The breadth of pragmaticism. The elements of the phaneron.