A classification of iconicity from Peircean phaneroscopy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1980-4016.esse.2025.240594Keywords:
Iconicity, Peircean semiotics, Phaneroscopy, Diagram, AbductionAbstract
This article proposes an expanded classification of iconicity anchored in Charles S. Peirce’s phaneroscopy and articulated through a compositional scheme that explains why the forms of iconicity accessible to consciousness are, in general, degenerate. I start from the hypothesis that pure icons — occurrences of Firstness in which there is formal indiscernibility between sign and object — afford a kind of immediate cognition that resists reflective thematization; therefore, most of what we call “iconic representation” in mental and cultural life appears in the degenerate forms of ergosemes (firstness of secondness) and metaphors (firstness of thirdness). I show that, by applying compositional rules inspired by Peirce’s speculative grammar, it is possible to derive 36 classes whose second correlate (the sign–object relation) is iconic (whether pure or degenerate).
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