Dear Clark, lists, I agree. Peirce's notion of iconicity can not be reduced to subjective similarity associations. It is an operational concept: certain operations performed on the icon represent real operations performed on the object of the icon. That is what permit to icons to teach new lessons: they have implicit properties which may be made explicit by manipulating them. But operation and manipulation are actions, not subjective ideas. It is also in this respect that P's idea has a structural similarity to Hertz, often quoted by Howard. Best F
Den 22/09/2014 kl. 16.00 skrev Clark Goble <cl...@lextek.com<mailto:cl...@lextek.com>> : On Sep 21, 2014, at 8:59 PM, Clark Goble <cl...@libertypages.com<mailto:cl...@libertypages.com>> wrote: On Sep 21, 2014, at 11:57 AM, Frederik Stjernfelt <stj...@hum.ku.dk<mailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk>> wrote: To Peirce, the relation of similarity connecting a diagram to its real-world object is not necessarily easy to grasp - on the contrary, in many cases it requires protracted work of both empirical and theoretical stripe. In Peirce's doctrine of how reasoning with diagrams is undertaken, however, the central idea is that the manipulation possibiliites of the diagram correspond (to some degree) to the real transformation possibilities of the object depicted by the diagram. Peirce’s notion of icons seems necessarily tied to his scholastic realism. That realism is what makes the semiotics possible. Without it iconicity ends up being little more than a judgement things are similar and loses its power. Given that so many in the modern world are nominalists (even when they don’t know what the word means) I suspect that’s why the notion of icons are so frequently misunderstood and confused with symbols. I know you make rather clearly that same point in your book. (I just finished chapter 3) But I think it’s important to bring up given some scholars who see a tension between Peirce’s pragmatic maxim and his scholastic realism. I think iconicity, properly understood, resolves most tensions.
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