Depictive seeing and double content
In Catharine Abell & Katerina Bantinaki (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives on Picturing. Oxford University Press (2010)
| Abstract | A picture provides both configurational content concerning its design features, and recognitional content about its external subject. But how is this possible, since all that a viewer can actually see is the picture's own design? I argue that the most plausible explanation is that a picture's design has a dual function. It both encodes artistically relevant design content, and in turn that design content encodes the subject content of the picture--producing overall a double content structure. Also, it is highly desirable that a resulting double content theory for pictures should be closely integrated with a related double content account of perceptual content generally, so as to avoid suspicions of ad hoc theorizing that would apply only to pictorial content. The resulting theory should also be able to explain the inevitable ambiguities involved in abstracting two levels of visual content from a single visible surface, as well as explaining the systematic relations between the two kinds of content. I provide an orientational theory--based on a recently developed spatial logic of orientational concepts--for this purpose, and show how depictive and perceptual content in general can be usefully explained in these orientational terms. This account of picturing also integrates well with a previously developed, more generic double content theory of art, and it is also plausible in cognitive science terms. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,709 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesAlex Byrne (2009). Experience and Content. Philosophical Quarterly 59 (236):429-451.
John Dilworth (2007). Representationalism and Indeterminate Perceptual Content. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (3):369-387.
Sonia Sedivy (1996). Conventional Naturalism: A Perceptualist Account of Pictorial Representation. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 10 (2):103 – 125.
John Dilworth (2005). The Perception of Representational Content. British Journal Of Aesthetics 45 (4):388-411.
Josefa Toribio (2008). State Versus Content: The Unfair Trial of Perceptual Nonconceptualism. Erkenntnis 69 (3):351 - 361.
John Dilworth (2003). Medium, Subject Matter and Representation. Southern Journal of Philosophy 41 (1):45-62.
John Dilworth (2005). A Double Content Theory of Artistic Representation. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (3):249–260.
Alon Chasid (2007). Content-Free Pictorial Realism. Philosophical Studies 135 (3):375 - 405.
John Dilworth (2005). The Double Content of Perception. Synthese 146 (3):225-243.
John Dilworth (2005). The Twofold Orientational Structure of Perception. Philosophical Psychology 18 (2):187-203.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-08-02Total downloads25 ( #49,684 of 549,671 )Recent downloads (6 months)2 ( #37,450 of 549,671 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
