Charles S. Peirce: “How to Define”

This chapter presents and analyses Peirce’s previously unpublished late sequence of drafts on the interconnected topics of definitions, pragmaticism, phaneroscopy, and logical analysis. The papers, in the Robin catalogue located in the folders R 643–R 649, were written in six highly discrete draft versions and fragments between December 1909 and May 1910. There have been no previous studies of them in the literature. An inspection of these papers leads to the conclusion that the sixth draft of the series, titled “The Nature of the Three Grades of Clearness” (R 649, March 27–May 6, 1910), was Peirce’s final candidate for his lingering Monist series on pragmaticism that began in 1905, in which his “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism” was the third and the last article that appeared in October 1906. The sixth draft was written in a fair copy-text form, but Peirce never submitted the piece to Paul Carus, the editor of the Open Court Publishing House. The “How to Define” series presents manifold ideas, suggestions, and observations about logical analysis, phaneroscopy, and definition, and what these studies, when aided by the maxim of pragmaticism, should look like in Peirce’s view. This paper first introduces the series, analyses their compositions, and highlights their contributions. The reader is invited to study the appended original texts and discover many more.