Page:Chance, love, and logic - philosophical essays (IA chancelovelogicp00peir 0).pdf/28

 laws are the finders rather than merely the summaries of factual truths. This conception of the experimental scientist as translating general propositions into prescriptions for attaining new experimental truths, is the starting point of Peirce's pragmatism. The latter is embodied in the principle that the meaning of a concept is to be found in "all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of the concept could imply."[12]

In the earlier statement of the pragmatic maxim,[13] Peirce emphasized the consequences for conduct that follow from the acceptance or rejection of an idea; but the stoical maxim that the end of man is action did not appeal to him as much at sixty as it did at thirty.[14] Naturally also Peirce could not follow the development of pragmatism by Wm. James who, like almost all modern psychologists, was a thorough nominalist and always emphasized particular sensible experience.[15] It seemed to Peirce that such em-*