Depiction, perception, and imagination: Responses to Richard Wollheim

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 60, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 27-35

  Walton, Kendall ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049160986     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1540-6245.00049     Document Type: Review

References (51)

1. Richard Wollheim, "On Pictorial Representation," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 217-233
2. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art: The Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Princeton University Press, 1987)
3. My main contributions to the discussion are Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Harvard University Press, 1990), chap. 8
4. Walton, "Seeing-In and Seeing Fictionally," in James Hopkins and Anthony Savile, Mind, Psychoanalysis, and Art: Essays for Richard Wollheim (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 281-291
5. and Walton, "Pictures and Photographs: Objections Answered," in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 60-75
6. Wolheim, "On Pictorial Representation," p. 223
7. cf. Wollheim, Painting as an Art: The Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, p. 69
8. There is room for skepticism about this. Perhaps such things can be depicted, misrepresented, as being visible. Robert Hopkins has interesting things to say about this in "Explaining Depiction," The Philosophical Review 104 (1995): 429-431
9. and Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 168
10. Cf. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 229-330
11. Wollheim, "On Pictorial Representation," p. 223
12. Perhaps he means to be avoiding this commitment when he says, "Representations that are of things merely of some particular kind" cannot "sustain answers to the question, Which object? Which event? or, Which woman? Which battle?" ("On Pictorial Representation," p. 223.) But the sense in which they cannot is very unclear. These questions invite any number of reasonable answers: "That one," "The one in the picture," "The one so-and-so is now looking at," "The one wearing the fancy hat," "The one looking over her shoulder." Which if any of these answers is informative will of course depend on the context
13. Whether they are true when taken literally depends on one's theory of fiction. In Painting as an Art, Wollheim notes that "of course, "This is a picture of Venus' does not admit of existential generalization" (Painting as an Art, p. 361, n.16)
14. The representational content of a painting is "often, and totally misleadingly, referred to as its 'illusionistic' content," Wollheim remarks. And he speaks of "the unjustified assimilation of the representational to the illusionistic or the imitative" (Richard Wollheim, "On Formalism and Pictorial Organization," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59[2001]: 131-132)
15. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, p. 361, n. 21
16. On my theory, it is fictional in the world of the picture that there are peasants but not that I see them. Both statements express fictional truths in the spectator's game world. Cf. my Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 293-304
17. Those who think that there really is something (the woman in the picture) that I imagine seeing still have the problem of saying what sort of thing this is, although they needn't say that it is something that can actually be seen
18. There may be no specific mode of cognitive access such that readers imagine knowing about a person in that manner. Nevertheless, they probably imagine that their cognitive access to the person is in some ordinary manner or other
19. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, pp. 210, 215, 218, 223, and 234-235
20. Paintings as an Art, p. 46
21. Wollheim, Paintings as an Art, p. 195
22. Robert Hopkins (among others) has argued for the plausible thesis that depiction is necessarily from a point of view ("Explaining Depiction," p. 428
23. Picture, Image and Experience, p. 36), while noting that there can be significant indeterminacies in a picture's perspective
24. (Ambiguities also, I would add.) Dominic Lopes observes rightly that a picture need not represent things from a single point of view (Lopes, Understanding Pictures [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], p. 120). I think a picture might conceivably lack a point of view entirely but that this virtually never happens
25. My point here is essentially the same as that of an example I introduced in another place of two circular films or videos of a roller coaster ride, one made with a camera fixed to the roller coaster and gyrating with it, the other made with a camera remaining rigidly upright. What is portrayed, what the viewer sees in the (moving) picture, is the same in the two cases, but they are sure to affect viewers very differently. Picture perception is not just a matter of ascertaining what is true in the world of the picture, as I put it there, or of what we see in the picture surface, even what we see to be included in the "represented space." The difference between the two films cannot be explained in terms of what we see in them. Cf. Kendall Walton, "Make-Believe, and Its Role in Pictorial Representation and the Acquisition of Knowledge," Philosophic Exchange 23 (1993): 81-95
26. Reprinted in Aesthetics, ed. Susan Feagin and Patrick Maynard (Oxford University Press, 1997)
27. Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 337-348
28. Malcolm Budd, "On Looking at a Picture," in Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art: Perspectives on Richard Wollheim, ed. Jim Hopkins and Anthony Savile (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 271
29. Cf., for example, the studies described by Lien B. Pham and Shelley E. Taylor, "From Thought to Action: Effects of Process- Versus Outcome-Based Mental Simulations on Performance," Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (1999): 250-260
30. Roger N. Shepard, "The Mental Image," American Psychologist 33 (1978):125-137
31. and Shelley E. Taylor, Lien B. Pham, Inna D. Rivkin, and David A. Armor, "Harnessing the Imagination: Mental Simulation, Self-Regulation, and Coping," American Psychologist 53 (1998):429-439
32. Wollheim claimed that the make-believe theory has "grave difficulties" in accounting for this phenomenon (Paintings as an Art, p. 360, n.8)
33. Jerrold Levinson, "Wollheim on Pictorial Representation," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 227
34. I will not examine the most obvious difference between Levinson and Wollheim: Levinson rejects the necessity of "twofoldness," which Wollheim has always taken to be at the very heart of his conception of seeing-in
35. "Wollheim on Pictorial Representation," p. 229, emphasis in original
36. Jerrold Levinson, "Making Believe," in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 294
37. "Wollheim on Pictorial Representation," p. 232, n.3, emphasis in original. Wollheim expressly allows for imaginings being involuntary or passive rather than active, and so does not share Levinson's conception of imagining
38. Cf. Wollheim, "Imagination and Identification," in On Art and the Mind (Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 69 ff
39. See Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 293-352
40. Catherine Abell and Gregory Currie, "Internal and External Pictures," Philosophical Psychology 12 (1999): 440-441
41. I do not know how Currie will square this suggestion with his skeptical remarks in Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
42. which I discuss in "On Pictures and Photographs: Objections Answered," in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 60-75
43. I responded to this objection in Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 301-30 2
44. Cf. my exchange with Wollheim in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (1991)
45. Symposium on Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 401-406 and 423-427
46. and Walton, "Seeing-In and Seeing Fictionally," p. 288
47. More recently, Wollheim described me as "the major contemporary advocate of the theory that we relate to the content of pictures through the imagination rather than perceptually" ("A Passionate Sightseer," review of Michael Podro, Depiction, in The Times Literary Supplement 23 [April 1999], p. 20). I decline the honor, having designed my theory to establish and explain the fundamentally perceptual nature of pictorial representation
48. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 38 and 40-41
49. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 207. My principles are not tied essentially to artists' intentions, as his standards of correctness are
50. If the recording is of an actual concert performance (as many of Gould's recordings are not), in hearing (directly) the sounds from the speakers, I am hearing, indirectly, the actual performance. I imagine my experience to be one of hearing the performance directly. (Cf. my "Transparent Pictures," in Critical Inquiry 11 [1984]: 246-277.)
51. I am indebted to Malcolm Budd, David Hills, Jerrold Levinson, Patrick Maynard, and Richard Wollheim for discussions of the ideas in this essay