I may have misunderstood pragmaticism myself. The core idea pragmatism is that the object of an idea equates the sensible effects that the object might have. This idea come fron C.S Pierce paper " How to make our idea clear ". He thinks having clear idea is important build sound reasoning. Clear idea are idea that we easiliy recognize and manipulate. He argues that some ideas may seems clear to a person but may not be really clear. To avoid such situation, he definite stage of clearness to reach. The first stage of the apprehension of a concept is to be able have a unreflective grasp of it in everyday experience. The second stage is to be able to define it. The final and third stage is to apply the maxim.
For example, what does a car mean ? I have a unreflective grasp of what is a car. I could define it as a ground vehicule suited to roads that can carry from 2 to 5 passengers. Now to apply the maxim, i gonna think what effect the object of my concept of a "car" might have. I could state as such, " if a is car, then i can drive a to go to work." The process of applying the maxim is to build testable hypothese on the concept. The meaning of the concept would be theses testables hypotheses and nothing more.
The argument of Pierce is that this is absurd to think the object of your concept have effects that don't have pratical bearing as the whole purpose of thought is to create new
habits of action. The object of a concept if only something that have pratical bearing. If it didnt have effects on the pratical, it might as well mean nothing. When you understand what Pierce mean, we could say that he see inquiry as a whole in purely scientific term.
He use the maxim to demarcate to what he considers to be useless metaphysics from what he considers useful.
I thought this maxim to be interesting as a useful heuristic. Thought is for action, if the object of one your idea don't have any effects that have pratical bearings, it might aswell be meaningless. Using this maxim ground your thoughts on the pratical, on the problem-solving and prediction etc.
If you want to have a better explanation, i advise you to read this secondary source (
https://iep.utm.edu/peircepr/#H2) and the primary source, the paper " How to make our idea clear " (
https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%201878%20Make%20Ideas%20Clear.pdf)
I would like to state that the maxim isn't the mere equivalent of verificationism. You could clarify quite abstract concept with it.
And when i stated that Dewey theory was interesting from a naturalistic perspective, i misunderstood it. One of the similarities in the "pragmatist" schools are that they don't consider the metaphysics, they are more similar to a very strong empiricism than a metaphysical naturalism.
Synthesis :
The pragmatic maxim is used in the process to make concept clearer in relating to the pratical. If the object of an concept don't relate to the pratical anyhow, it's meaningless as the goal of thought is to create habit of action.