The Say-Is Distinction as Genuine Pragmatist Innovation: What the Article Gets Right

The article “An Exegesis of the First Six Sentences of Section III of Charles Sanders Peirce’s ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’” is a strange, fascinating beast. It takes six sentences of nineteenth-century prose and subjects them to an interrogation so intense it borders on the hallucinatory. The author constructs an elaborate dialectical theater, complete with hypothetical “Challengers” and “Defenders,” and tortures Peirce’s verb tenses until they confess to a rigid, uncompromising “prospective-actualism.” Confronted with this baroque exegetical machinery, a reader might be tempted to throw the whole text out.

That would be a mistake.

Here is the secret of good philosophical scavenging: you do not have to buy the architect’s entire blueprint to steal the best furniture. We can wholly discard the article’s grander, more vulnerable claims about Peirce’s actualism and the phantom Socratic dialogue allegedly hidden in the text. What remains, once we clear away the brush, is a quiet, devastating observation about Peirce’s metalinguistic framing. The article identifies what it calls the say-is distinction —an observation that Peirce scholarship has largely missed, and one that cements pragmatism’s rightful place in the great sophistic tradition of prioritizing language, use, and effects over Socratic essences.

The Distraction of the Apparatus

Let us first dispatch the article’s weaker claims so we can admire its triumph. The author insists that Peirce is secretly penning a dialectical exchange, mapping the two conditions of the famous “cushion-diamond” thought experiment (the diamond being crystallized and burned up vs. the diamond resting in cotton) onto distinct philosophical interlocutors. It is a clever bit of staging, but it is pure fiction. Peirce’s prose in 1878 is direct, and the transition from definition to consequence to test-case is a perfectly standard expository pattern that requires no invisible “Challengers” to make sense.

Furthermore, the author forces Peirce into a strict actualist straitjacket, arguing that Peirce only cares about effects that will happen, not effects that would happen. To achieve this, the author must aggressively translate away the subjunctive “woulds” that pepper the text.

But we do not need the dialectical staging, nor do we need the rigid actualism, to salvage the core insight of the piece. By stripping away this apparatus, we find a pristine pragmatist innovation waiting to be amplified.

The Say-Is Distinction

Consider the author’s catalog of Peirce’s linguistic shifts (identified in the text’s Claims 43–47 and 51). The author notices that when Peirce moves from the classical, second grade of clearness (2GC) to the pragmatic, third grade of clearness (3GC), he stops asking what things are and starts asking what we can say about them.

The classical 2GC question is fundamentally Socratic and ontological: “What is hardness?” It demands an essence. It demands a peek behind the curtain of experience to gaze upon the timeless Form of the Hard. Peirce, however, pivots in his first question (Q1): “Let us ask what we mean by calling a thing hard.”

The article brilliantly tracks this metalinguistic tic across How to Make Our Ideas Clear . The author finds six distinct instances of this framing, culminating in the second question regarding the untested cushion-diamond: “Would it be false to say that that diamond was soft?” The author rightly points out that this is not a rhetorical accident. It is a systematic replacement of object-level essentialism with metalinguistic pragmatism. As the author puts it, 3GC definitions are metalinguistic; they concern what we can say based on practical effects. 2GC definitions are object-level; they traffic in timeless abstractions.

This is the say-is distinction. It is a profound insight, and the author deserves immense credit for isolating it.

For a journal dedicated to the proposition that pragmatism is the modern heir to ancient sophistry, the say-is distinction is a triumph. Socrates wanted to know what Piety or Hardness is in the abstract, independent of human affairs. The sophist, conversely, knows that we only have the words we use, the contexts in which we use them, and the practical effects they produce. By shifting the locus of meaning from the ontological “is” to the discursive “say,” Peirce effectively dissolves the metaphysical problem. He replaces the philosopher’s quest for essence with the sophist’s mastery of vocabulary.

Anticipating the Linguistic Turn

The tragedy of the target article is that it uses this brilliant discovery merely to prop up a dubious actualist reading of Peirce. But the say-is distinction has far grander historical resonance. It connects Peirce’s early pragmatism directly to the most potent developments in twentieth-century analytic philosophy of language—connections that traditional Peirce scholarship has not fully exploited.

Think of Rudolf Carnap’s seminal 1950 essay, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.” Carnap distinguished between “internal” questions (questions asked from within the rules of a specific linguistic framework) and “external” questions (questions about the reality of the framework itself). The 2GC philosopher asks an external question: is the untested diamond really hard out there in the mind-independent world? Peirce, armed with the say-is distinction, realizes that external questions are meaningless. We can only ask internal questions about the rules of our vocabulary: does our linguistic framework warrant saying the diamond is hard when it produces no scratch-effects? The author’s observation that Peirce treats the cushion-diamond as an “arrangement of language” rather than a “question of fact” is pure Carnap, seventy years early.

Or consider Wilfrid Sellars’s account of concept-use in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956), and Robert Brandom’s subsequent inferentialist reading of Peirce in Making It Explicit (1994). For Sellars and Brandom, to grasp a concept is not to have an inner mental representation of a worldly essence; it is to master the use of a word in the “space of reasons.” When Peirce asks what we mean by calling a thing hard, he is anticipating this exact move. He is treating “hard” not as a label for a hidden dispositional property, but as a discursive ticket that licenses certain inferences (e.g., “if we say it is hard, we are licensed to infer it will not be scratched”). The say-is distinction is the conceptual bridge between classical pragmatism and modern inferentialism.

Finally, the say-is distinction anticipates the deflationary, “subject naturalist” approaches championed by Huw Price and Richard Rorty. As Rorty famously noted in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), the linguistic turn is what saved pragmatism from bogging down in nineteenth-century metaphysics. Price’s Naturalism Without Mirrors (2011) argues that we should stop asking what mysterious entities (like moral facts or unmanifested dispositions) exist in the world, and start asking what function the vocabularies of morality or disposition serve for the human creatures who use them.

The target article shows us that Peirce was already doing this in 1878. He was already practicing vocabulary-pragmatism. By pointing out that Peirce asks whether it would be “false to say ” the diamond is soft—rather than asking whether the diamond is soft—the article proves that Peirce’s primary concern was the warrant for our discursive practices, not the furniture of the universe.

Conclusion

The author of this exegesis went digging in the text of How to Make Our Ideas Clear for a rigid actualist metaphysics and an invisible Socratic dialogue. They found instead something far more valuable: a quiet, metalinguistic revolution.

The say-is distinction is the true engine of Peirce’s early pragmatism. It is the mechanism by which he converts intractable ontological puzzles into manageable questions of linguistic use and practical effects. We do not need to accept the author’s baroque dialectical staging, nor their insistence on prospective-actualism, to recognize the brilliance of this specific observation.

By isolating the say-is distinction, the article opens an incredibly productive channel between Peirce scholarship and analytic philosophy of language. It reminds us that the pragmatist does not ask what a thing is; the pragmatist asks what gives us the right to say it. That is a thoroughly sophistical insight, and it is exactly the kind of philosophical work that deserves amplification.