Abstract

After describing some of the ways in which pragmatist philosophers have employed different views about how to do philosophy, this paper explains how their different philosophical goals determine how they actually do philosoophy. We explain and discuss two aspects of Peirce’s work that are relevant to the ways in which he does philosophy: his remarks about the use of “literary prose” in philosophy and his valuable discussion of the “ethics of notation.” This is grounded in view of how philosophical writing should be carried out. We then discuss Peirce’s reasons for revising the model of representation that he adopted: he began by formulating philosophical issues about representation in terms of belief, but changed to give a central role to, first, judgment and, then, assertion. The paper concludes by discussing how these developments affected the development of his pragmatism.