article on 'Truth and Practice,' I understand this as a hint to me
to join in the controversy over 'Pragmatism' which seems to have
seriously begun. As my name has been coupled with the movement, I
deem it wise to take the hint, the more so as in some quarters
greater credit has been given me than I deserve, and
probably undeserved discredit in other quarters falls also to my
lot.

First, as to the word 'pragmatism.' I myself have only used the term
to indicate a method of carrying on abstract discussion. The serious
meaning of a concept, says Mr. Peirce, lies in the concrete
difference to some one which its being true will make. Strive to
bring all debated conceptions to that' pragmatic' test, and you will
escape vain wrangling: if it can make no practical difference which
of two statements be true, then they are really one statement in two
verbal forms; if it can make no practical difference whether a given
statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning.
In neither case is there anything fit to quarrel about: we may
save our breath, and pass to more important things.

All that the pragmatic method implies, then, is that truths should
HAVE practical [Footnote: 'Practical' in the sense of PARTICULAR, of
course, not in the sense that the consequences may not be MENTAL as
well as physical.] consequences. In England the word has been used
more broadly still, to cover the notion that the truth of any
statement CONSISTS in the consequences, and particularly in their
being good consequences. Here we get beyond affairs of method
altogether; and since my pragmatism and this wider pragmatism are
so different, and both are important enough to have different names,
I think that Mr. Schiller's proposal to call the wider pragmatism by