106
PARTISAN REVIEW
(2.150).
RR:
[Your] contribution to pragmatism was merely to have given it a
name ... (CP, p.161).
CSP:
It has probably never happened that any philosopher has attempted
to give a general name to his own doctrine without that name's soon
acquiring in common philosophical usage, a signification much broader
than was originally intended. . .. [My] word "pragmatism" ... begins to
be met with occasionally in the literary journals, where it gets abused in
the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into literary
clutches.... So, then, the writer, finding his bantling "pragmatism" so pro–
moted, feels that it is time to kiss his child goodbye and relinquish it to its
higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the orig–
inal defini tion, he begs to announce the birth of the word "pragmaticism,"
which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers (5.143-4).
It
is good economy for philosophy to provide itself with a vocabulary
so outlandish that loose thinkers shall not be tempted to borrow its words.
. . . Whoever deliberately uses a word ... in any other sense than that which
was conferred upon it by its sole rightful creator commits a shameful offense
against the inventor of the symbol and against science, and it becomes the
duty of the others to treat the act wi th contempt and indignation (2.223-4).
RR:
Revolutionary movements within an intellectual discipline require a
revisionist history of that discipline
(CI~
p.211).
CSP:
It seems to me a pity [that the pragmatists of today\ shou ld al low a
philosophy so instinct with life to become infected with seeds of death in
such notions as that of ... the mutability of truth ... (6.485).
Except where otherwise indicated, Peirce's contributions are
taken from:
Collected Papers,
eds Hartshorne,
C,
Weiss,
P.
and Burks, A., Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1931 -58; references by vol ume and paragraph number.
Peirce's comment about the kink in his brain is reported by E.T Bell in
The
Development oj Mathematics,
McGraw-Hili, New York and London, 1949, p.51 9.
The quotation Peirce attributes to Shakespeare is actually from Milton's
Comus.
Rorty's contributions to the conversation are taken from:
CIS:
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1989.
CP:
Consequences oj
Pra,~matism,
Harvester, Hassocks, Sussex, 1982.
EHO:
Essays on Heidegger and Others,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
