 James never worked out his understanding of ‘practical consequences’ as fully as Peirce did, and he does not share Peirce’s restriction of these consequences to general patterns of behaviour. Sometimes he writes as if the practical consequences of a proposition can simply be effects upon the individual believer: if religious belief makes me feel better, then that contributes to the pragmatic clarification of ‘God exists’. James also hopes that the attempt to clarify metaphysical hypotheses will reveal that some propositions are empty or, more important, that, as in the squirrel example, some apparent disagreements are unreal. Peirce sees uses for his maxim beyond those James had in mind. He insisted that it was a logical principle, in a broad sense of logic which includes scientific methodology. So for instance he used it to clarify concepts central to scientific reasoning such as probability, truth, and reality. (We shall discuss his views on truth and reality further below.) Pragmatism, described by Peirce as a ‘laboratory philosophy’, shows us how we test theories by carrying out experiments in the expectation that if the hypothesis is not true, then the experiment will fail to have some predetermined sensible effect.