  It is in this light that his specifications of the nature of pragmatism are to be understood. It is also in this light that his later calling of his views “pragmaticism,” in order to distinguish his own scientific philosophy from other conceptions and theories that were trafficked under the title “pragmatism,” is to be understood. When he said that the whole meaning of a (clear) conception consists in the entire set of its practical consequences, he had in mind that a meaningful conception must have some sort of experiential “cash value,” must somehow be capable of being related to some sort of collection of possible empirical observations under specifiable conditions. Peirce insisted that the entire meaning of a meaningful conception consisted in the totality of such specifications of possible observations. For example, Peirce tended to spell out the meaning of dispositional properties such as “hard” or “heavy” by using the same sort of counterfactual constructions as, say, Karl Hempel would use. Peirce was not a simple operationalist in his philosophy of science; nor was he a simple verificationist in his epistemology: he believed in the reality of abstractions, and in many ways his thinking about universals resembles that of the medieval realists in metaphysics. Nevertheless, despite his metaphysical leanings, Peirce’s views bear a strong family resemblance to operationalism and verificationism.  In regard to physical concepts in particular, his views are quite close to those of, say, Einstein, who held that the whole meaning of a physical concept is determined by an exact method of measuring it.