Internal versus external representation

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 62, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 23-36

  Dilworth, John ^a  

^a WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049541235     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-594X.2004.00132.x     Document Type: Review

References (21)

1. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 67-71
2. Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Harvard University Press, 1990), chap. 3
3. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), chap 1
4. Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, pp. 21-26
5. Kendall Walton holds such a view for photographs in "Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 246-277
6. while Dominic Lopes extends it to pictures generally in his book Understanding Pictures (Oxford University Press, 1996), chap 9
7. For a critique of such views independent of mine, see Nigel Warburton, "Seeing through 'Seeing through Photographs,'" Ratio 1 (1988): 64-74
8. Walton, "Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," and Lopes, Understanding Pictures
9. See, for example, Keith Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Descriptions," Philosophical Review 75 (1966): 281-304
10. Antonia Phillips provides a convincing account of the centrality of recognition in portraiture in her paper "The Limits of Portrayal," in Philosophy and the Visual Arts, ed. A. Harrison (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel, 1987), pp. 317-341
11. Arguments for this view are given in my paper "Representation and Resemblance," The Philosophical Forum 12 (1980): 139-158, while Lopes, Understanding Pictures, and Phillips, "The Limits of Portrayal," provide other arguments for recognitional views of representation. The following section also provides relevant arguments
12. Lopes, Understanding Pictures, gives a useful account of some relations between recognition and representation, though he assumes a unitary concept of representation
13. See, for example, Walton, "Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," and the references therein
14. However, an account is still possible of the sense in which it is true that Hamlet exists in the fictional world of the play "Hamlet." See my paper "The Fictionality of Plays," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (2002): 263-273
15. Also see my "Theater, Representation, Types and Interpretation, " American Philosophical Quarterly 39 (2002): 197-209
16. Alexius Meinong, "On the Theory of Objects," in Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, ed. Roderick Chisholm (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), pp. 76-117
17. For example, Terence Parsons, Nonexistent Objects (Yale University Press, 1980)
18. In my "The Fictionality of Plays" I provide ancillary discussions of the epistemic authority of representations in helping to determine the internal truth-conditions for fictional statements
19. In my "A Representational Theory of Artefacts and Artworks," The British Journal of Aesthetics 41 (2001): 353-370, and "The Fictionality of Plays."
20. As Borges showed, on one interpretation of his story, with his well-known example of a fictitious work by one "Pierre Menard," the text of which was word for word identical with the text of a section of Cervantes's Don Quixote, but whose aesthetic qualities were quite different, hence, ensuring its identity as a literary artwork distinct from the relevant part of Don Quixote itself. Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" in Labyrinths, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985)
21. My thanks to the editor, Susan Feagin, and to an anonymous referee of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism for very helpful comments