Is a letter of the alphabet considered something?

Question

Can a letter of the alphabet be considered a thing, or something? I know that a letter can be used to symbolize something, but the symbolization doesn’t make it so. As an example, the letter U is the symbol for uranium, but the letter isn’t uranium itself. So is it incorrect to consider a letter a thing? A Thing, or something, is an object, such as uranium. A symbol is a representation of an object, but not the object itself, so is a letter nothing?

Answer 1

The phrase, "the letter U" can mean several different things depending on context.

1. "See that fly just above the letter U in the sign?" Here the "the letter U" refers to a physical mark on a physical object. The mark itself is a physical object constructed out ink or paint (unless, it is a cut-out U, in which case it's more problematic whether it's a physical object). Surely a physical object is a thing.

2. "In this word, the letter U should be in italic." In a printed book, this refers to a set of physical letters U, namely the set of each letter U in that position in each copy of the book. Arguably a set of physical objects is a thing. In a computer document, it refers to any occurrence of the U in that position in any presentation of the document. Is that a physical object? Not really. However, it may still be a thing.

3. "The letter U in PUT has the same sound as the pair OO in FOOT." In this case, the letter U refers to a component of whatever PUT is. What is PUT? If PUT were a reference to every physical presentation of the word 'put' then it might be considered a physical object, but it seems to refer also to possible presentations of the word that are never realized. That makes it an abstract object, which makes this usage of U an abstract object. As to whether abstract objects are things, that is itself a controversial question.

4. "The letter U has several sounds in English." Like the previous, this seems to be an abstract meaning for U, so it is a thing just in case abstract objects are things.

Answer 2

Short Answer

Does a letter have being? According to many philosophers, such as Alexius Meinong, yes, though you'll find philosophers have very heated debates about existence.

Long Answer

To linguists, a letter is a grapheme:

In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.

You can think of a grapheme as a simple visual experience. What makes a letter useful is generally it stands for something else. That is why it is a symbol. In philosophy, the discipline that explores symbols in the abstract is called semiotics. From WP:

Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter.

Philosophically, what makes semiotics interesting is that it requires the notion of shared intentionality. That is, communication is an act that requires two philosophical agents to be "about" the same thing. In this case, the letter in your example is how the communication functions, in this way, in a general sense, the letter U can be understood as a the message in communication theory.

But how does producing a grapheme help in communication? How does shaping the physical media around us allow communication and meaning to occur? Well, according to the semiotic triangle, an extension of thinking of Gottlob Frege's sense and reference, the symbol triggers an association, reference, or experience in the perceiver connecting the symbol to the referent. Hence, when you see three graphemes in a particular order (eg, "CAT"), you suddenly experience extensions and intensions of cat.

Is a letter a 'thing'? That's an ontological question, and hinges on what you mean by letter. If you mean the physical medium that is shaped like the grapheme, then sure, it's a physical thing. You might put a letter-candle on a birthday cake. If you're talking about the experience of grapheme, the 'u' in your mind, for instance, than that is an experience, and isn't physical. However, there are philosophical arguments that try to include abstractions as a type of thing. For instance, many philosophers of math consider mathematical objects 'things'. While philosophers like Carnap and Quine are famous for their contemporary ontology, one particularly important and older philosopher named Alexius Meinong is known for his Meinongian jungle. So, certainly, according to Meinong, an abstraction like a letter has some form of being:

Alexius Meinong, an Austrian philosopher active at the turn of the 20th century, believed that since non-existent things could apparently be referred to, they must have some sort of being, which he termed sosein ("being so"). A unicorn and a pegasus are both non-being; yet it's true that unicorns have horns and pegasi have wings. Thus non-existent things like unicorns, square circles, and golden mountains can have different properties, and must have a 'being such-and-such' even though they lack 'being' proper.1 The strangeness of such entities led to this ontological realm being referred to as "Meinong's jungle".

Answer 3

I am not quite clear about your question, and it seems to me that previous answers have not quite addressed what you meant.

"Letter" is ambiguous between two different things. It can be used for a token, which would mean the physical phenomenon, which we look at as we read. In this sense, it can be a physical object, but since it is most often a mark on a background, I think it is more appropriate to think of it as a line or a shape.

But there is another sense in which "Letter" can mean the schema or pattern that we are following as we make marks or shape objects into letters. In this sense, it is a type (of which the physical marks are tokens) and, I would say, an abstract object; and I would compare numerals and numbers.

There is a connection between writing and speaking and so there is a connection between letters and sounds. But this is very complicated.

Some letters, such as the vowels, and letters like "l", "r","v", "s", "w" can be sounded on their own. But many of the remaining consonants, such as "t", "d", "p", cannot. Some letters, such as "c", and "g" can sometimes be sounded on their own and sometimes not.

Mostly, letters do contribute to how we say the word they occur in, but not necessarily by being sounded. For example, they often tell the reader how to sound another letter, as in "bite" and "bit".

Sometimes, they are there for purely historical reasons. Compare "right" and "rite". The words sound exactly the same, but they mean different things. The first comes from an ancient Germanic language and was pronounced "richt"; the second comes from Latin.

Which prompts me to point out that sometimes two letters combine to make one sound, as in the double vowels "oo" and "ee" and the diphthongs "ae", "ie" and "ei", and "loch" and "children" and "show".

But even where a letter can be sounded on its own, I think it is a mistake to say it "represents" the sound. A representation is like what it represents, and a letter is nothing like its sound and when you consider the complications above, I hope you will not be tempted to put it that way.

A letter does symbolize its sound, and this is in some sense the paradigmatic idea about them. But it is only part of their story. However, being a symbol for something does not require being like that something. The relationship between the two is purely conventional.

Normally a letter is an element in a word and has no meaning on its own (except when it is used as the name for itself). The word "uranium" does symbolize uranium and the letter "U" also symbolizes uranium, but that is only because that letter is, exceptionally, being used as a word, not because it is a letter.

This is far from complete, but it may be enough for your purposes.