Abstrakt
Pragmatism is said to be born in the early 1870s within the sessions of Cambridge Metaphysical Club, having as its foundation Peirce's 1877/78 papers "The Fixation of belief" and "How to make our ideas clear". However, as shown in this paper, pragmatist ideas published in these works had already been presented in Peirce's earlier texts.
This paper is focused on Peirce's pre-pragmatist thinking presented in the "Treatise on Metaphysics" (1861, W 1: 57-84). This work, moreover, shows that the pre-pragmatist ideas are closely connected to metaphysics and stay therefore as basis of all scientific thinking.
It will be shown that the later pragmatist texts use the exact same notions and ideas as the "Treatise" does, marked only by the difference in terminology.