Frances to Armando and William... If a house on a street in a town is to be depicted as an iconic picture, the degree of iconicity will be affected by the abstraction used. The issue is how far iconic abstraction of the house can be pushed or placed or pulled at those levels that are microscopic and mesoscopic and macroscopic, and yet still retain some resemblance and similarity of the house in the picture. The front door might remain an icon of the house, but likely not the door knob or the knob screw. The treed lot might also remain an icon of the house, but likely not the neighborhood or the municipality.
In regard to abstraction, of the house or any other depicted object, it might also be useful to consider the "semiotic" difference in "syntactic" formal abstraction of say a changed color for only the surface texture, and in "semantic" referential abstraction of say the changed size for only one window, and also perhaps in "pragmatic" instrumental abstraction of say the changed locale for the displayed orientation. In regard to "syntactic" formal abstraction, it is likely so that every aspect of form in part or whole, such as for example visible colors or textures or shapes or figures and so on, will be iconically similar to at least some quality of feeling. It is also likely true that all things can be reduced to an essential generality or logical atom at some distant finite point, but then by application all things would be infinitely like all other things. If this principle is applied to architecture, then all of its token products are like all other token products, thereby signifying a typical class of token members with similar formal tones. In other words, architecture grows continually by way of iconic similarity, so that the past flows into the present and forces the future. This probably also holds the same for language and literature, where new words grow out of old words by way of iconic analogous metaphors. To think abstractly is to cognize an object in its absence from sense by way of a surrogate cognitive sign, of which icons are the main way to start doing this. In mind the icon is immediate and holistic and general and virtually direct. The rational problem with icons and even though they are fundamentally necessary for all signs and thoughts is that they are neither false nor true, but must remain logically senseless, because the relation of their formal similarity to their referred object and these to their interpreted effect cannot be fully confirmed as being false or true. This likely why icons are often held by semioticians to gravitate "closer" to the arts than perhaps other indexic and symbolic signs might do. William wrote... As far as I'm concerned there is no such thing as a totally abstract painting; or every painting is totally abstract. It's either all one or all the other and there's no difference between them. All representation or recognition is due to associative neural activity. And every act of looking ignites the associative stream. So, everything looks like something else.
