Frances to Thomas... Thanks for the added quotes on the term "intermediate" and its idea. They will go into my Peircean pool of passages for future phishing. To be cagey, it would seem that the term "intermediate" for Peirce leans slightly right of center away from strict secondness and somewhat toward slight thirdness, which alas is not at all what might have been expected by me.
In the postscript to your message, you stated in effect that "directly monstrative" is certainly a carefully crafted allusion to "demonstrative" while at the same time more forceful and less insistent than "demonstrative" in that the proof simply manages to show what cannot possibly be described in the same way as "directly monstrative" expresses what cannot possibly be said in a "demonstrative" way. You then mused on what to do with "to see the force" of something. If the "crafted allusion" of Peirce is understood correctly by me, for a thinker to see the rhetorical force of a conclusive proof as culled from its grammatical form and critical fact is to prescribe or predict its probable evocative outcome merely from attending to what is directly and monstratively given in the connective ground that formally relates premiss to conclusion, where the monstration is identified as being iconically similar to the presupposed existential experience the thinker already has of phenomena. In other words, the initial direct proof would seem to be based on common sense, in that the directness of monstrated proof is derived from its iconic similarity to the ordinary experience of represented objects. Human logic according to Peirce is thus seemingly an obstinate and degenerate form of pure logic that thinkers discover. What is likely found however is not a rigid mechanical world predetermined to exist by some agent of design, but rather is a dispositional tendency for the natural world to simply evolve logically. The human aquisition and utilization of pure logic is perhaps one of intermediate phenomena, acting as a bridge laying related between say immediate nomena and mediate epiphenomena, if it can be put in those terms within a Peircean framework. --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
