‘ICONISMO’ VS. ‘VEDERE COME’: IL CONCETTO DI SOMIGLIANZA IN WITTGENSTEIN E PEIRCE, TRA VISIONE E LINGUAGGIO

In this text, Peirce’s notion of icon(ism) and Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘seeing as’ are compared in order to gain a more general semiotic notion of resemblance (or rather “likeness”), with a wide domain, which is not limited to the phenomena of vision. Peirce’s perspective (namely, his categories) offers a good theoretical framework. Resemblance is not a dyadic phenomenon – an oriented relation “A resembles B” (and so A can be a sign of B) – but it rather belongs to firstness: possibility of being-like comes before every single empirical resemblance. This primacy of possibility does not imply an anti-realistic position (see Peirce’s “cotary propositions”: CP 5.180 ff.). We can translate Peirce’s stance in Wittgensteinian terms, by saying that there’s no seeing without ‘seeing as’, even if we don’t consider “aspects” of things if we are not compelled by “aspect-changing” (where bi-stability is the most striking phenomenon). This notion of resemblance/likeness is relevant for a wide range of phenomena, such as music and language. Namely, we can say that it is an element of what we could call (in a broad sense) ‘grammar’. Grammar, actually, is analogic reasoning plus immediate normativity.