Do Pictures Look Like What They Depict?

Pictures look like what they depict to those who understand them. That is a natural and seemingly unassailable thought. Looking at Mona Lisa, the painting strikes us as looking like a woman with a mysterious smile in front of a mountainous backdrop. Call this the ‘looks like’ intuition. It is tempting to think not just that the ‘looks like’ intuition is true, but that it gets at the heart of what is distinctive about depictive understanding in pre-theoretical, informal terms. To understand a depiction (as opposed to a linguistic description, say) is for it to strike us as looking like what it depicts. In this talk, I take the ‘looks like’ intuition at face-value, and discuss what it more precisely comes to. I consider and reject three interpretations, before presenting what I take to be its correct interpretation. It is easy to think that the intuition points to an inherent connection between depiction and resemblance, but I argue that that is false. Its correct interpretation is Wollheimian: when we understand a picture P of O, P ‘looks like’ O in the sense of giving us a (very distinctive kind of) visual experience of O.

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