I was reading in Eco, "on the basis of the Kabbalistic belief that every letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a meaning, at least a numerological meaning. So the Kabbalah too, though it may seem to be combining and permutating alphabetical elements, is really permutating and combining concepts." My first reaction is that this is absurd, that they are just the arbitrary signs we accidentally learned in the accidental culture we grew up in. But then I thought 1] alphabets have now been around for nearly 3, 000 years, hence they must pick up debris; 2] the WAY alphabets are taught to primary school children give a sort of 'tone' or context to each letter, ergo a 'conceptual interpretation' of a sort. What did Peirce think? Surely he at least had some thoughts about how language is first learned. What can be derived from that?
Gary C. Moore
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