phonetician

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One of Peirce’s pet peeves was the recycling of terminology, especially common terms that didn’t carry the same implication or strict meaning across multiple translations between languages and eras. His philosophic and scientific definitions written for the Century Dictionary are very interesting partly for this reason (also, he’s somewhat smarmy). One consequence is that he often made up words in order to clarify and distinguish the particular definitions within his own systems, which is clever as it discourages jumping between different parts of his more complicated work, as well as the philosophic habit of using fuzzy analogies.

As a result, “Pragmaticist” carries a different association than “Pragmatism” or “Pragmatist”, as the latter have been blurred and watered down, while the former is ugly and unwieldy enough to discourage abuse (which was Peirce’s stated reason for opting to use it).

“Pragmaticalist” strikes me as quite strange, as well (we don’t say “syntacticalist” or “logicalist”). I think there may in fact be a word formation rule being violated: “-ist” can attach to “-al” adjectives, but given an “-ic”/”-ical” variation, we attach “-ist” to the former. (Variation as in geographic(al), comic(al), monastic(al), where the sense doesn’t change. I suppose that in those cases where it does, e.g. “politic” = judicious, “political” = concerning law, one could arguably add “-ist” to either: a politicist is one who follows a doctrine of being politic, and a politicalist is one who follows a doctrine of being political. But “pragmatic(al)” isn’t one of those cases.)