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.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(166)

Why Is Genius Still Gendered?

In the past, accounts of genius have been put forward which explicitly exclude women from this category. Today genius does not tend to be explicated in such an explicitly gendered way. Nonetheless, st...

15 Jun 43min

Fear, Sallust and Roman Political Theory

Explaining the decline of the Roman Republic, the historian Sallust made a famous claim about the importance of fear, a claim which has influenced writers from Augustine to Schmitt. Drawing on phenome...

15 Jun 48min

Consent and Common Ground

Manon Garcia has recently proposed a model of sexual consent as conversation, which emphasizes collaboration and that interlocutors work together toward a common goal. Independently, though in a simil...

15 Jun 40min

Inextricability and the Brain

In discussions concerning the possibility of AI consciousness, computational functionalism has been the dominant position. This is the view that consciousness is essentially kind of computation and th...

15 Jun 1h 1min

Aristotle on Being Ruled Well

In Politics 3.4 Aristotle distinguishes the virtue of the good citizen from the virtue of the good person by noting that the good citizen should both rule well and be ruled well. I show that ‘being ru...

15 Jun 42min

Touching Through: The Puzzle of Mediated Contact (co-authored with Robert Morgan, University of Leeds)

It is natural to think that one person touches another when their bodies make direct contact. However, much of interpersonal touch is not like this. We often touch people through things like their clo...

15 Jun 49min

Why Doesn't Physics Matter More?

There is an explanatory puzzle about the relationship between physics and the rest of science: if the lower-level facts from physics in some way underpin higher-level facts, why don’t the lower-level ...

15 Jun 43min