Peirce and Dasan: A Comparison in Which Each Reads the Other

This manuscript uses a comparative device in which Charles Sanders Peirce and Jeong Yak-yong are made to read one another’s primary texts, tracing across their long writing lives where their pragmatic modes of thought converge and where they diverge. What repeatedly appears in common is not simple utility but a living process linking doubt, inquiry, experiment, action,consequence, and revision, grounded respectively in scientific practice and in the practical work of administration, criminal adjudication, and technology. A review of Korean scholarship on pragmatism and of direct comparative studies shows the coexistence of work that carefully captures the conjunction of inquiry and practice and work that reduces pragmatism to “utility” or to “practice rather than theory.” Finally, the manuscript combines the two thinkers into one hypothetical system and proposes a Peirce–Dasan pragmatism that treats both the laboratory and the administrative field as sites of inquiry in which one acts and learns. The aim is not to present a finished doctrine but to leave new questions and possibilities of comparison for later researchers. Two language versions are available with the same DOI, one is in English and the other in Korean.