Names usually point us to persons, places or things, so we learn, by the age of 3 or 4, maybe even younger. Later we learn that names apply to many other kinds of things: events, decisions, holes, spaces, directions, ideas, none of which technically are "persons", "places" or "things", per se. And yet, it is the purpose of a name to cover them all, to do them justice, and to lead us, presumably to them, however it is they are to be approach or engaged either spatio-temporally or intellectually.
So we have all kinds of names as well, if not more than the previous set of kinds of things, for which we then need new kinds of names for our kinds of names for our kinds of whatevers which happen to, as we might expect, carry on differentiating in their various and copious ways. Of course, there are simple names like "John" but also there are names like "Yu" or "AdapterFactoryMessageContainerFormatterSingletonFactor" or even "127.0.0.1" or "OpenPGP.v3-asdf". It's also obviously conceivable that a name can only be its true meaning if it is written in a certain color or if it is uttered only, never written. The list of criteria for a name is endless, truly. And yet the list of kinds of things also seems endless — which is bigger, the list of names or the list of kinds of things?
They certainly pick out things in the world, but why do these special symbols or characters do so in just the way they do, whereas non-special characters do not? What really is so different from a E and a ℇ or ∃, well, they were all introduced at different times, by different persons, probably. Something about their form and style carried along with the fact of their origination. And yet, they all mean very much different things, or can at any rate, and sometimes they can be used to say the same thing as one would as if they were all interchangeable. So the rules seem to emerge out of meaning thus and so in just the way one does, as often as one does, and apparently these symbols, often enough, are successful at reflecting the models of that fact of reality as it was then and conceivably re-portrayable in the future, given the meanings of words stick around, as it were, to how things are going on with us. The environment certainly also seems to play a role, in re-enforcing these singular multiples, but how might we determine their fit in the semiotic system-theoretic model of hypermedia communication?
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