  By “speculative rhetoric” or “methodeutic” Peirce understood all inquiry into the principles of the effective use of signs for producing valuable courses of research and giving valuable expositions.  Methodeutic studies the methods that researchers should use in investigating, giving expositions of, and creating applications of the truth. Peirce also understood, under the heading of speculative rhetoric, the analysis of communicational interactions and strategies, and their bearing on the evaluation of inferences. Peirce’s important topic of the economy of research is closely affiliated with his idea of speculative rhetoric.  The idea of methodeutic may overlap to some small extent with Morris’s notion of “pragmatics,” but the spirit of Peirce’s notion is much more extensive than that of Morris’s notion.  Moreover, Peirce handled the notion of indexical reference under the heading of speculative grammar and not under the heading of speculative rhetoric, whereas the topic certainly belongs to Morris’s pragmatics. There clearly exist connections  between Peirce’s speculative rhetoric, on the one hand, and the attention paid  by twentieth-century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin  to matters having to do with language as a set of various social practices.  Unfortunately, however, little attention has been paid by Peirce scholars  to the relations between Peirce’s thinking and familiar twentieth-century  notions such as Wittgenstein’s language-games and Austin’s speech-acts.