I have committed to remaining within this thread so as not to muddy anything up with tangent statements. What I say here is aimed at stimulating talk about what I intend as Triadic Philosophy. But it seems to me that when I find lines that express what I believe, they should be placed here from time to time. The following from Ben squares with my understanding.
QUOTE My sense of it is that Peirce does not push the idea that mathematicals are real. His discussions of math and reality tend to involve a variation of sense of word 'real' into the concretely real, the actual, the existent, etc. He says that mathematicians (of whom he of course was one) don't care about the real and that their ideal forms are the truly real to them a la Plato. I do recall Peirce somewhere saying that the question of whether mathematicals are real is a question for the metaphysician, not the mathematician, and I recall him not answering the question at that point. Peirce always says that mathematical objects are purely hypothetical. END QUOTE I have suggested that math is finite as all reality is save that part of it which seems impossible to understand and that it like reason and logic are utilities accessible to consciousness. I do not attribute this sense to anyone else but I find it consistent with, or at least relates to, what I have quoted above.
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