On Jul 6, 2014, at 1:16 PM, Gary Moore <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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? > One should note that when Eco discusses the Kabbalah he’s talking about beliefs about the Torah by Kabbalists. Those beliefs need not be correct of course. Typically Eco uses the Kabbalah as an example of a language with maximum semiotic drift. The perfect Open Text. He has some examples of the perfect Closed Text as well. He’s much more getting at the drives to these two poles of language in various of his books such as The Quest for the Perfect Language or The Limits of Interpretation. The idea ends up being a tension that’s long been part of philosophy of language. Is language fundamentally founded on metaphor and drift (Derrida) or foundational direct reference to experiences or things (say the Positivists or arguably Leibniz) You can see this tension in Peirce as well. We have the symbol which is arbitrary but more importantly both icons and indices which are more grounded in various ways. Within the later Peirce, especially the letters to Lady Welby, you have an essential gap in the sign movement from object to interpretant that opens up drift. (This gap is what Derrida plays with and which is so essential for his though) For the Kabbalist this gap opens up the possibility of revelation. I think you end up with a similar move in most Platonisms. For Peirce we work backwards via the guess in abduction and then test via deduction and induction plus a logic of continued inquiry. An other way to think of all this is that the drift in the sign enables a shift of denotation in language due to connotation. Eco plays this up via an analysis of the type/token issue that arises out of Peirce. For Derrida, who in many places Eco follows, the key issue is what gets replicated in language. The type, the token, or the relationship between the two. This type/token issue to my eyes seems key in language and is still one area where I don’t think philosophers have made much progress - partially due to not seeing this as an issue.
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