Charles Sanders Peirce, 10 November 1900, to William James :
"Who originated the term pragmatism, I or you ? Where did it first appear in print ? What do you understand by it ?"William James, 26 November 1900, to Charles Sanders Peirce :
"You invented 'pragmatism' for which I gave you full credit in a lecture entitled 'Philosophical conceptions and practical results' of which I sent you 2 (unacknowledged) copies a couple of years ago."
"The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? — fated or free? 00 material or spiritual? -- here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be ale to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right.
. "The term ['pragmatism' ] is derived from the same Greek word [pragma], meaning action, from which our words "practice" and "practical" come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. ...
* Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947).
A. N . Whitehead, 2 January 1936, to Charles Hartshorne :"My belief is that the effective founders of the American Renaissance are Charles Peirce and William James. Of these men, W. J. is the analogue to Plato, and C. P. to Aristotle."(in Victor Lowe, Whitehead, etc., Baltimore, 1985, 1990, 2:345 — as given in Autobiography of C. S. Peirce, editor Ketner, Nashville and London, 1998, p. 39).
* Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932).
To take in the importance of Peirce's principle, one must get accustomed to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago that Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making perfectly distinct use of the principle of pragmatism in his lectures on the philosophy of science, though he had not called it by that name.
"All realities influence our practice," he wrote me, "and that influence is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions to my classes in this way : In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense."
That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and meaning, other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald in a published lecture gives this example of what he means. Chemists have long wrangled over the inner constitution of certain bodies . . . Controversy raged, but never was decided. "It would never had begun," says Ostwald, "if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental fact could have been made different by one or the other view being correct. For it would then have appeared that no difference of fact could possibly ensue ; and the quarrel was as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the raising of dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a 'brownie,' while another insisted on an 'elf' as the true cause of the phenomenon."3
3 "Theorie und Praxis," Zeitschrift des Oesterreichischen Ingenieur-u. Architecten-Vereins, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6. [etc]
(W. James, Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Lecture II, "What Pragmatism Means". New York, 1907. Per 'Essays in Pragmatism', New York and London, 1966, pp. 143-4).