Iconicity of Logic: and the roots of the “iconicity” concept

Frederik Stjernfelt

Iconicity of Logic: and the roots of the “iconicity” concept

Frederik Stjernfelt

Department of Arts and Cultural Studies

Abstract

It seems to be a standard assumption that Charles Morris originated the concept of “iconicity” on the basis of Peirce’s icon-index-symbol discussion. This paper locates the origin in Peirce himself, in the context of judging the merits of different mathematical and logic representations – the more iconic such representations generally being preferable to less iconic ones, for scientific purposes. In Peirce’s Collected Papers, “iconicity” occurs in the discussion of different conventions in the logic representation system called “Existential Graphs”. This paper provides the context of logic representations in order to show how Peirce’s articulation of the concept of “iconicity” comes out of the attempt to find as iconic a way as possible to depict logical relations. Moreover, this indicates a use of “iconicity”, from the very beginning, which addresses not only similarities between different visual representations – but also visual representations of abstract contents.

Original language	English
Book series	Iconicity in Language and Literature
Pages (from-to)	35-53
ISSN	1873-5037
Publication status	Published - Mar 2015

Keywords

Faculty of Humanities
logic
semiotics
iconicity
language
Peirce

Cite this

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title = "Iconicity of Logic: and the roots of the “iconicity” concept ",

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AB - It seems to be a standard assumption that Charles Morris originated the concept of “iconicity” on the basis of Peirce’s icon-index-symbol discussion. This paper locates the origin in Peirce himself, in the context of judging the merits of different mathematical and logic representations – the more iconic such representations generally being preferable to less iconic ones, for scientific purposes. In Peirce’s Collected Papers, “iconicity” occurs in the discussion of different conventions in the logic representation system called “Existential Graphs”. This paper provides the context of logic representations in order to show how Peirce’s articulation of the concept of “iconicity” comes out of the attempt to find as iconic a way as possible to depict logical relations. Moreover, this indicates a use of “iconicity”, from the very beginning, which addresses not only similarities between different visual representations – but also visual representations of abstract contents.

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Iconicity of Logic: and the roots of the “iconicity” concept

Abstract

Keywords

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