 Peirce’s description of his maxim as a logical principle is reflected in passages where he presents it as a development of a distinction that had been a staple of traditional logic texts, and familiar to readers of Descartes, between ideas that are clear and distinct (EP1: 126f). Peirce understood the first grade of clarity about the meaning of a concept as being able to identify instances of it, without necessarily being able to say how. He then took his philosophical contemporaries to hold that the highest grade of clarity, distinctness, is obtained when we can analyze a concept into its elements by providing a verbal definition (or, in more recent terminology, necessary and sufficient conditions for its application). Peirce complained that ‘nothing new is ever learned by analyzing definitions’, unless we already have a clear understanding of the defining terms. He therefore announced that the Pragmatic Maxim enabled a higher (‘third’) grade of clarity, that supplemented the verbal definition with a description of how the concept is employed in practice. 