The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of ‘Do two men really mean the same by the word “white”?’
Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.— Wittgenstein (1930, III.27)
Suppose we want to know what’s meant by the term pragmatism. How would we investigate that?
What the true definition of Pragmatism may be, I find it very hard to say; but in my nature it is a sort of instinctive attraction for living facts.
— Peirce, CP 5.64
What makes these facts living is that they can surprise us, and this can happen because we are modellers whose models are made of our own substance. As a theory of meaning, pragmatism is well grounded in biological reality, as a living system like yourself ‘emulates its own behavioral space’ (Metzinger 2003, 264). In other words, its Innenwelt models its possibilities of interaction with its Umwelt.
William James, in Lecture VI of his Pragmatism, defines truth in terms of its functionality in a guidance system:
When a moment in our experience, of any kind whatever, inspires us with a thought that is true, that means that sooner or later we dip by that thought’s guidance into the particulars of experience again and make advantageous connexion with them.
— James (1907, 575)
To ‘agree’ in the widest sense with a reality, can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed. Better either intellectually or practically! And often agreement will only mean the negative fact that nothing contradictory from the quarter of that reality comes to interfere with the way in which our ideas guide us elsewhere. To copy a reality is, indeed, one very important way of agreeing with it, but it is far from being essential. The essential thing is the process of being guided. Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn’t entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality’s whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will hold true of that reality.
— James (1907, 579)
As an alternative to his ‘classic’ statement of the ‘pragmatic maxim,’ Peirce offered this alternative in the first of his Harvard lectures:
Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood.
— EP2:134-5
According to this principle, then, the ‘practical maxim’ corresponding to a ‘theoretical judgment’ would say “If the situation is thus, do this.”
For the pragmatist there is no point in a belief but to organize a life, to guide its actions. Peirce (more than James) emphasized the point that the meaning of a genuine belief is in futuro and can never be exhausted by any number of applications to past or present situations. Whatever really guides your conduct is real, whether or not the actual occasion ever arises where it would determine specific actions.