Icons in action
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences June 25, 2026 Wim Pouw
Iconicity is the informative relation between an utterance's form and its meaning, but defining it formally is difficult. Researchers often base iconicity on resemblances, yet philosophical critiques of depiction raise fundamental issues against resemblance-based accounts. Recent work argues that iconicity should abandon objective resemblances and instead be understood as in the eye of the beholder, reflecting a struggle between iconicity as a property of mind versus environment. This paper proposes an alternative relational ontology informed by 4E cognition approaches, which view iconicity as arising from a niche-constructed organism-environment system. The account offers a philosophical ontology and working definition that keeps iconicity verifiable and context-dependent without reducing it to either objective resemblances or subjective mental states.