The invisible content of visual art

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 19-27

  Rollins, Mark ^a  

^a WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 45749139891     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0021-8529.00003     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (16)

1. Although, for Gombrich, schemata also have psychological counterparts, i.e., mental representations of some sort, and those are highly knowledge dependent. For a discussion of this point see Mark Rollins, "Pictorial Representation: When Cognitive Science Meets Aesthetics," Philosophical Psychology 12 (1999).
2. Mark Rollins, "Pictorial Attitudes," Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 154-157.
3. Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (MIT Press, 1989);
4. David Marr, Vision (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1982).
5. Mark Rollins, "Deep Plasticity: A General Encoding Approach," Philosophy of Science 61 (1994): 39-59.
6. It is important to recognize that Danto's claim that pictures resemble their denotata does not entail that pictures actually denote the objects by virtue of resembling them. According to certain "recognition" theories of depiction, picture recognition draws only on ordinary perceptual abilities, just as Danto has said. (See, e.g., Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures [Cambridge University Press, 1986]
7. and Dominic Lopes, Understanding Pictures [Oxford University Press, 1993].) But recognition is explained in terms of mental representations, the contents of which are determined by their typical causal covariance with items in the world. This opens the door to a theory of pictorial denotation that is based on a causal theory of perception: What a picture denotes, in Danto's sense of denotation, depends on the typical causal covariants of the mental representations it activates. This is very close to Danto's idea of pictorial competence. However, according to recognition theories, even if the mental representations that ground pictorial denotation happen to resemble the picture's denotata, it is their typical causal covariants, not the resemblance, that determines what is denoted. Resemblance may play a diagnostic role for the perceiver, allowing her or him to recognize what is denoted. But the picture need not denote what it does, just in virtue of that fact. My claim, then, is that not only do pictures not denote by virtue of resemblance, but also that resemblance does not have to play this diagnostic role, or any other part, in Danto's theory or argument. I leave aside here the question of how denotation is related to reference and reference to meaning. If reference is distinct from denotation (because it requires a relation to a real individual), that is, of course, consistent with my claim that denotation does not figure into meaning, whatever the relation between reference and meaning is supposed to be.
8. Arthur Danto, "Description and the Phenomenology of Painting," in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Holly, and Keith Moxey (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 212.
9. Danto, "Description and the Phenomenology of Painting," p. 201.
10. See "Seeing and Showing," above.
11. Richard Wollheim, "Danto's Gallery of Indiscernibles," Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 28-38.
12. Paul Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective (MIT Press, 1989), pp. 255-279.
13. V. S. Ramachandran, "Interactions between Motion, Depth, Color and Form: The Utilitarian Theory of Perception," in Vision: Coding and Efficiency, ed. Colin Blakemore (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 346-360;
14. Patricia Churchland, V. S. Ramachandran, and Terranee Sejnowski, in "A Critique of Pure Vision," Large Scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain, ed. Christof Koch and J. David (MIT Press, 1994), pp. 23-60.
15. Stephen Kosslyn, Image and Brain (MIT Press, 1994).
16. Patricia Churchland and Terrance Sejnowski, "Neural Representation and Neural Computation," Neural Connections, Mental Computation, ed. Lynn Nadel, Lynn Cooper, Peter Culicover, and Robert Harnish (MIT Press, 1989), pp. 15-48.