'
To take in the importance of Peirce's principle, one must get
accustomed to applying it to concrete cases. I found a few years ago
that Ostwald, the illustrious Leipzig chemist, had been making
perfectly distinct use of the principle of pragmatism in his
lectures on the philosophy of science, tho he had not called it by
that name.
"All realities influence our practice," he wrote me, "and that
influence is their meaning for us. I am accustomed to put questions
to my classes in this way: In what respects would the world be
different if this alternative or that were true? If I can find
nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no
sense."
That is, the rival views mean practically the same thing, and
meaning, other than practical, there is for us none. Ostwald in a
published lecture gives this example of what he means. Chemists have
long wrangled over the inner constitution of certain bodies called
'tautomerous.' Their properties seemed equally consistent with the
notion that an instable hydrogen atom oscillates inside of them, or
that they are instable mixtures of two bodies. Controversy raged;
but never was decided. "It would never have begun," says Ostwald,
"if the combatants had asked themselves what particular experimental
fact could have been made different by one or the other view being
correct.
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