Different levels or degrees of conceptual clarity about the signs we use.
In Charles S. Peirce‘s perhaps best-known essay, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, he distinguishes three degrees of clarity: subjective awareness, abstract definition, and pragmatic clarification.
At the most basic level, one must be able to express one’s subjective awareness through signs, as well as be able to interpret these signs correctly.
When I try to convince my five-year-old son that I rode a dinosaur to school at his age, he responds by saying that this never happened (in his own words, “it’s not true”). Here his use of “true” shows an awareness, a pure, albeit rudimentary, level of understanding.
Although it is unlikely that he will be able to formulate some abstract definition of what he and other people understand by the term “true.”
The ability to produce such a definition, for example, that “true” is something that is independent of what you or I, or each individual, or an actual group of individuals thinks, shows a degree of clarity higher than that of awareness. But according to Peirce, there is a level of clarity higher than that of the abstract definition, this level is acquired through a pragmatic maxim.
According to this maxim, we should coordinate our concepts according to their perceived practical effects (i.e., in their possible effects on human activity). The concept of God, in terms of deification, reverence, and worship, could be pragmatically clarified, as it defines God in terms of how to honor him (through deification, reverence, and worship). The most important goal of Peirce‘s pragmatic maxim is to push our research to a higher degree of clarity than the abstract definition suggests.
Of course, whether such a thing really exists is a question of the truth of the claim that there is a God. Peirce’s view does not deal directly with the question of truth, but with meaning.
First, we should know what we are talking about, then and only then can we determine the certainty of our claims or the truth of our judgments.
Clarity about the meaning of an idea is not in itself a guarantee of the ascribed nature or reality of the object perceived through that idea.
