A pioneer in many fields of logic and philosophy - of knowledge, language, mathematics, and psychology - Peirce (1839-1914) is best known for his work in semiotics. This is also the founder of pragmatism, a major philosophical currents of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth e. But this pragmatism is still unrecognized, and too often associated with the two other classical theorists of the movement, William James and John Dewey. However, in his time already, Peirce had renamed it “pragmaticism”, to distance himself from the too materialistic, utilitarian and moralistic reading of his followers. For him, pragmatism was understood above all not as a doctrine, but as a method of conceptual clarification, based on a semantic and semiotic interpretation of logic, which, once the false problems of metaphysics had been eliminated, should open up to a new conception of scientific inquiry, meaning and knowledge, in the service of a scientific and realistic metaphysics, strongly inspired by Duns Scotus. The aim of this work is to identify three major characteristics of Peircian pragmatism: therapeutic, philosophical method of "manipulation of signs", scientific method of fixing true beliefs. This is where the specificity, originality and fruitfulness of Peircian pragmatism reside, which makes it impossible to confuse it with that of James or Dewey, as with contemporary neo-pragmatism (Richard Rorty). |