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David Boersema, The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 64, Issue 255, April 2014, Pages 328–330, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqt050
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Some things (e.g. fresh produce) start out fine, but can worsen over time. Other things (e.g. fine wines) start out fine, and get even better over time. The work of Christopher Hookway is in the latter category. This latest book builds upon and also illuminates his two previous books that focused on pragmatism in general and Peirce in particular (Peirce, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985 and Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce, OUP, 2000). The book contains a summarizing introduction followed by eleven chapters. These chapters consist of nine previously published papers, ranging from 1997–2011, and two new essays. While the chapters cover many of the same concerns as his earlier two books—such as Peirce's wrestling with problems of truth and reality—they are by no means a mere rehashing of what he has said before. The clear guiding focus here is on how Peirce understood his pragmatic maxim and on what we can best learn from it (as well as from Peirce's attempts to explicate it). As Hookway notes, although Peirce put forth various characterizations of what came to be called ‘the pragmatic maxim’, the classic statement of it appeared in the 1878 paper, ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’:
Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
