More on Pragmatism

I've just read Peirce's basic pragmatist essays, and found them pretty interesting. The basic idea is that all concepts which cannot be reduced to experience--or some possible experience--are meaningless. Any metaphysical distinction that goes beyond possible experience is pretty much nonsense. I'm not sure what pragamatism says about ethics, and how legal theorists end up using it. But the main thing that annoys me about philosophy are the endless debates about minor technicalities that serve no purpose. Is a boat whose planks are replaced one by one the same when all the planks are replaced, or is the boat built with the discarded planks the original? Who can say? I don't think there is a right answer to such questions; they merely exist to illuminate the vagueness of the concepts we use. If a pragmatist could cast aside the nit-picky questions in legal philosophy I found so obnoxious, I'd be all for it.