[MD] humpty dumpty

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[DMB]
The main difference, I think, is that James's pragmatism was more radical with respect to his conception of truth. Pierce's notion of truth was something like an ideal, the final goal of a community of competent inquirers.

[Arlo]
I'm not sure I get this from Peirce, but I am more familiar with his semiotics than I am his general pragmaticism. I'll have to look more into this.

[DMB]
This notion is not very far away from the scientific, positivistic conception of truth as representing or corresponding to the one and only objective reality. He rejects that kind of objectivity - to be sure - but his notion of truth is still quite scientific.

[Arlo]
Yes, to be sure Peirce is very formal and scientific in his ideas. I think when he comes to the notion of 'abduction' he moves inquiry away from a the S/O objectivity that science is normally associated with. And, I typically read Peirce being primarily interested in aligning 'belief' with 'experience' to inform 'activity', and not towards any idea of an Absolute Truth or ideal.

[DMB]
This is the core concept behind just about any kind of pragmatism, that truth and meaning are to be found in actual practice, in our doings and strivings and in actual engagement with empirical reality. That's where beliefs are useful or not, where they are shown to be true or not. 

[Arlo]
Agree. And this is where I think Peirce's essay on fixing belief is a useful starting point for talking about 'how we come to believe' or 'on what basis do we believe things', and my point was to show my own mapping of those ideas to Pirsig's hierarchy (an imprecise mapping, to be sure, but one I think that has value).

[DMB]
Then of course James and Pirsig also go on to say quite a lot about the rightness of ideas, insisting that the best truths will acknowledge and include the affective domain, to include the passions and the aesthetic and our feelings in general - as well as logic reason. MOQers know it as the expansion of rationality. He didn't do a thing for Quality or the Tao, Pirsig says. What benefitted (from the MOQ) was reason, he says. 

[Arlo]
Agree, and Peirce didn't write as much on aesthetics, instead shifting to semiosis (although his writings on abduction necessarily include a pre-intellectual, aesthetic to inquiry that parallels Poincare and Einstein, and Pirsig).