Iconic Representations and Representative Practices

Abstract

I develop an account of scientific representations building on Charles S. Peirce's rich, and still underexplored, notion of iconicity. Iconic representations occupy a central place in Peirce's philosophy, in his innovative approach to logic and in his practice as a scientist. Starting from a discussion of Peirce's approach to diagrams, I claim that Peirce's own representations are in line with his formulation of iconicity, and that they are more broadly connected to the pragmatist philosophy he developed in parallel with his scientific work. I then defend the contemporary relevance of Peirce's approach to iconic representations, and specifically argue that Peirce offers a useful ‘third way’ between what Mauricio Suárez has recently described as the ‘analytical’ and ‘practical’ inquiries into the concept of representation. As a philosophically minded scientist and an experimentally inclined philosopher, Peirce never divorced the practice of representing from questions about what counts as a representation. I claim that his account of iconic representations shows that it is the very process of representing, construed as a practice which is coextensive with observing and experimenting, that casts light on the nature of representative relations.

Acknowledgements

This article was completed as part of my residency as Joan Nordell Fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, summer 2013. I am grateful to the Library for granting me access to Peirce's manuscripts, as well as for providing assistance with the images reproduced in this publication. I presented a draft of this article at the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice, Toronto, June 2013. I am especially grateful to Mauricio Suárez and Christopher Pincock for agreeing to present their work alongside mine in what turned out to be a most inspiring panel on scientific representations, and for engaging in a number of productive conversations that truly contributed to shape my arguments in their present form. The Symbiology seminar series at the University of Exeter and the Philosophy of Science Reading Group at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL provided exceptionally stimulating venues to discuss Peirce's views and relate them to current debates in philosophy of science. Emma Tobin, Phyllis Illari, and Brendan Clarke proved once more to be the best colleagues any academic could hope for, by patiently putting up with my obsession with Peirce and truly engaging with it in the most constructive manner. Last but not least, James McAllister and two anonymous referees for this journal provided invaluable comments and criticism, accompanied by just the kind of refreshing encouragement that is so needed at the early stages of a career in academia.

Abbreviations for the Works of C. S. Peirce

CP followed by volume and paragraph number: Peirce (1931–1938/1958)

EPfollowed by volume and page number: Peirce (1992–1998)

MS followed by manuscript number (and page number, where available): unpublished manuscripts keyed to Robin (1967)

Notes

[1] I owe this insightful point to Margherita Benzi.

[2] The literature on Peirce's theory of signs is voluminous, and a comprehensive review of it is beyond the scope of this article. It is worth mentioning, however, at least two recent publications that explicitly reconnect Peirce's semiotics to broader philosophical themes. Short (2007) offers an illuminating discussion of the relevance of Peirce's theory of signs to contemporary debates in epistemology, while Bergman (2009) draws together Peirce's semiotics with his broader views on the nature of scientific inquiry, offering an account of Peirce's theory of signs as a whole philosophy of communication. Two useful introductions to Peirce's semiotics for the uninitiated are Atkin (2010) and De Waal (2013).

[3] This is not unusual, as for Peirce diagrammatic representations, exemplified by his own system of diagrammatic logic, are a prime example of iconicity. The passage was written more or less at the time in which Peirce was developing his Existential Graphs, so it is not surprising to find ‘diagrams’ and ‘icons’ in the same sentence. Iconicity is, however, not just restricted to diagrammatic representations. For Peirce it incorporates a much broader range of representational formats. In a subsequent passage, he sub-classifies icons in three further categories, which he dubs ‘hypoicons’:

Hypoicons may roughly [be] divided according to the mode of Firstness which they partake. Those which partake the simple qualities, or First Firstness, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors. (EP 2.274)

[4] It is important to note that Peirce always stressed the continuity, rather than mutual exclusiveness, of his semiotic categories. In other words, he explicitly claimed that we never deal with ‘pure’ icons (or ‘pure’ indexes, or ‘pure’ symbols). The three classes of signs are always experienced and used in their mediated form. So, in the case of iconic signs, the participation of indexical and symbolic components is essential in experiencing and using icons as representations. This will become especially clear in Peirce's the discussion of diagrams, where both indexical and symbolic elements are recognized by Peirce as indispensable in supporting and performing the iconic process of making relations visible. This aspect of Peirce's discussion also reinforces the criticism against interpretations of iconicity as entailing exclusively a relation of similarity or resemblance between a representation and its object.

[5] Perhaps a bit confusingly here, Peirce labels his two versions of the winding curve respectively as ‘Figure 1’ for the upper part, and ‘Figure 2’ for the lower part where the curve bends over and crosses itself. For an insightful discussion of Peirce's image in terms of William Hogarth's concept of Serpentine Line, see Viola (2012).

[6] Here it may be useful to reiterate the idea that for Peirce iconicity in representation is not exclusively a matter of ‘resemblance’ or ‘likeness’, and that the representative function of diagrams is not, and cannot be, exclusively iconic (see note 4). The operation of ‘forcing attention’ in diagrams is performed by their indexical components, for instance. And their material representation depends on shared conventions, which are indispensable for their interpretation as diagrams in the first place.

[7] Defenders of similarity (and selective similarity) comprise, among others, the early van Fraassen (1980), van Fraassen (2008), Giere (1988, 2004), and Teller (2001). On the isomorphism (or partial isomorphism) side of the debate are Da Costa and French (2003). Van Fraassen's (2008) ‘structural empiricism’ hinges on a notion of selective similarity that ultimately is explained in terms of (structural) isomorphism, whereas Giere (2004) proposes a much weaker notion of similarity that refrains to appeal to ‘structure’.

[8] Goodman's criticism is addressed to a view of representation considered and defined exclusively in terms of resemblance. It must be noticed, however, that no philosophical definition of visual representations focuses exclusively on a notion of resemblance to explain the relation between pictorial representations and the objects they represent. This argument is developed, with specific reference to the relation of resemblance or ‘likeness’ that seems to govern Peirce's notion of iconic representations, by Dipert (1996, 381) and Shin (2002, 25).

[9] This is a more general problem affecting what is usually known as the semantic view of theories, which originated with Suppes (1960) and sees among its supporters van Fraassen (1980), Giere (1988), and Da Costa and French (2003).

[10] Indeed, as I show below, there are at least two recent accounts of scientific representations (Giere 2004; van Fraassen 2008) that attempt to bring together similarity and ‘use’, at the same time accounting for the fact that similarity does not exclusively exhaust the relation of representation.

[11] Practice-based accounts are a result of the most general ‘turn to practice’ that has characterized philosophy of science starting from the 1980s. The forerunners of this approach are Black (1962), Hesse (1963), and Achinstein (1968). Cartwright (1983), Hacking (1983), and Morgan and Morrison (1999) pioneered the shift towards practice-based approaches to models, whereas De Chadarevian and Hopwood (2004) have recently examined the historical context surrounding the production and use of models. More recent accounts include Suárez (1999, 2003) and useful overviews of this debate are in Frigg and Hunter (2010) and Suárez (2010). Some proponents of the semantic view have tried to reconnect a view of representation in terms of selective similarity with scientific practice: see for example Giere (2004) and van Fraassen (2008). The turn to practice in philosophy of science has a sociological counterpart in the accounts of representation in practice presented in Lynch and Woolgar (1990), and its recent revisited edition by Coopmans et al. (2014).

[12] Indeed, interpreting Peirce in light of contemporary structuralist accounts would only amount to projecting contemporary philosophical categories upon his account of representation, which would not do justice to the historical context in which Peirce formulated his ideas, and the specific aims that his account of representation was supposed to fulfil. Incidentally, the tendency to ‘project’ or attribute some of the assumptions advanced by contemporary structuralism to historical actors (Poincaré is a particularly recurrent case) seems to be a practice contemporary structuralists are particularly fond of.

[13] The emphasis on form makes Peirce's account slightly more subtle, and at the same time weaker, than the structuralist's emphasis on relations construed as set-theoretic structures.