The problem of the essential icon

TLDR: In this paper, the authors make a distinction between icon/index/symbol and pictorial and structural similarities between objects and signs, and use the term "signi fication" instead of "representation" or "reference".

Abstract: Charles Peirce made a well-known dis tinction between icons, indices and symbols. These are three kinds of signification-spe cifically, three kinds of relationship between a sign and its object. I use the term 'signi fication' instead of terms more familiar in analytic philosophy of language such as 'representation' or 'reference' in an attempt to loosen an apparent near-exclusive hold of the spoken and written word on many phi losophers' thinking about meaning, which is relevant to our topic. The icon/index/symbol distinction has already been much investi gated by Peirce scholars,1 but a brief summary will be helpful. Icons signify objects by resembling them.2 For example, a map of Australia signifies the continent of Australia by being of the same shape (however roughly). One of Peirce's definitions of the icon states that its parts should be related in the same way that the objects represented by those parts are them selves related.3 One might call this form of resemblance "structural resemblance," and the perspicuous representation of relations via structural resemblance is one of the icon's greatest strengths. There are obvious links here to the early Wittgenstein's "Pic ture Theory of Meaning," with the caveat that one may distinguish between structural and properly pictorial resemblance insofar as there are structural mappings which are not good pictures. As Peirce notes, "Many diagrams resemble their objects not at all in looks; it is only in respect to the relations of their parts that their likeness consists."4 The famous London Tube Map does not exactly represent the paths of its train-lines-it has been regularized, and is a more effective icon for that. On the other hand every pictorial resemblance is a structural resemblance, so structural is a generalization of pictorial re semblance. Of course the Tractatus is gnomic enough about meaning to leave it open that structural rather than pictorial resemblance is what Wittgenstein meant too. Is all iconic resemblance structural re semblance? This claim is too strong; there might also be "simple icons." For instance, a particular color might be used to signify a girl who is wearing a dress of that color, or whose personality arguably possesses some shared qualities (for example 'sunniness,' or 'intensity'). Such cases, as well as structural resemblance, are covered by what is arguably Peirce's most general definition of iconicity, which will be used here: "An icon is a sign fit to be used as such because it possesses the quality signified."5