Imagination, interpretation, and film

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 89, Issue 2-3, 1998, Pages 331-341

  Gaut, Berys ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 54749095465     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1004249432572     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Page numbers in the text of the present paper refer to this book.
2. See Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind (London: Methuen, 1974), chapters 7 and 8.
3. See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), chapter 8 for an example of the first kind of theorist. Also George Wilson seems to hold that this kind of participant imagining always occurs: see George M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 55. For a defense of the default version of this view, see Jerrold Levinson, "Seeing, Imaginarily, at the Movies", Philosophical Quarterly, 43, 1993, pp. 70-78.
4. The mode/content distinction is not Currie's way of putting the matter, but well captures the point. For an application of the distinction to imagining, see Richard Moran, "The Expression of Feeling in Imagination", Philosophical Review, 103, 1994, pp. 75-106.
5. Walton, ibid., pp. 237-239.
6. Ibid., pp. 174-183.
7. Ibid., pp. 237-239.
8. On the significance of the claim that beliefs aim at the true, see Peter Railton, "On the Hypothetical and Non-Hypothetical in Reasoning about Belief and Action" in Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (eds.), Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
9. For a defense of the role of identification in viewers' responses to films and a critique of some of Currie's arguments against identification, see my "Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film" in Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (eds.), Passionate Views: Thinking about Film and Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).
10. Kendall Walton, "Style and the Products and Processes of Art" in The Concept of Style, Berel Lang (ed.), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979.
11. Walton, ibid., pp. 95-96, in fact understands a Musical Joke so that at a superficial level of appearances its composer is incompetent, whereas at a deeper level of appearances he is competent, and thus there may seem no need to appeal lo actual fealures of the composer to ground the distinction between kinds of humourous responses. However, imagine we discovered that, despite this deeper level of appearances, Mozart really was an incompetent composer, then we would still, if we laughed, laugh at him. So what the artist is really like can still matter to interpretation. (The friend of the apparent artist account might reply that all this showed is that at a third, even deeper, level of appearances the composer of the piece is incompetent: but it should be clear by this point that appearances are being invented so as to conform to reality.)
12. Currie also discusses the implied author as "a figure who may in a sense be fictional or imagined" (262). IAI construed in terms of a fictional implied author would succumb to the same problems as does IAI construed in terms of an apparent implied author - namely, the absence of this author's causal powers and the relevance of actual intentions to interpretation.
13. See my "Interpreting the Arts: The Patchwork Theory", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (4), 1993, pp. 597-609.
14. See also Robert Stecker, Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), Part II, for another account that stresses the complexity of interpretation and rejects IAI.
15. A version of this paper was read at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Berkeley, March 1997. I would like to thank those present, and in particular Greg Currie, for helpful discussion.