Icons in Action

Iconicity is a term used in cognitive science and gesture studies to denote an informative relation between the form of an utterance and the meaning of that utterance. With good design, the form of an utterance can directly invite a suitable perceiver with a certain degree of initiation to iconically grasp a meaning in the right direction. Despite the now increasingly touted importance of iconicity in understanding human languages, it proves difficult to define more formally. When the term is defined, researchers tend to base iconicity on resemblances, such that A is iconic of B, if A resembles B in some relevant respect. In the philosophy of depiction fundamental issues have been raised against resemblance-based accounts. Even when barring such metaphysical issues, it has recently been argued that - for all practical research purposes - a 'state-of-the-art' definition of iconicity should also do away with objective resemblances. Instead, iconicity is in the eye of the beholder. This revision of iconicity seems to reflect a philosophical struggle between two extremes: Iconicity as a property of the mind, or iconicity as a property of the environment. In this paper, it is argued that - for all practical purposes - that there is an alternative relational ontology available to us, which is informed broadly by 4E approaches (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended). Taking this road should lead to a 'distributed' view, where iconicity arises in a niche-constructed organism-environment system. This paper aims to further deepen this account by offering a practical philosophical ontology and working definition that keeps iconicity verifiable and context-dependent without reducing it to either objective resemblances or subjective mental states.