The Meaning of Pragmatism: The Ethics of Terminology and the Language of Philosophy

I. The classical pragmatist tradition; contemporary distortions of pragmatism. II. Peirce's thesis of the "growth of meaning"; its relevance to the vocabulary of the sciences and the rationality of the scientific enterprise. III. Peirce's "ethics of terminology"; its connection with his aspiration to make philosophy "scientific." IV. Why, in the language of philosophy today, we see impoverishment of meaning and violations of the ethics of terminology.