High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Pragmaticism is a term used by Charles Sanders Peirce for his pragmatic philosophy after 1905, in order to distance himself and it from pragmatism, the original name, which had been used in a manner he did not approve of in the "literary journals". He said that he coined it because it was "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers" (Collected Papers (CP) 5.414). Whether one chooses to call it "pragmatism" or "pragmaticism", and Peirce himself was not always consistent about it even after the notorious renaming, his conception of pragmatic philosophy is based on one or another version of the so-called "pragmatic maxim".