Abstract
The theory of mental representation that I am arguing for in the present study is, as was already apparent in the Introduction, in sharp contrast to currently held versions of the so-called representational theory of mind (RTM). To recall the main point, proponents of RTM, or of representationalism, postulate mental vehicles, or mental symbols/signs, of representation. In the context of the present study, mental images, quasi-pictorial representations and the like entities, assumed to be at work in achieving imagistic reference,are of particular interest (see above, p. 2ff.). For up to this point an analysis of relatively simple phenomenological forms of purely mentally representing something has here been proposed, according to which these activities of intentionally referring to an object in the intuitive manner do not require any mental vehicle of representation.
Most people think they know what a picture is. Anything so familiar must be simple. They are wrong.
J. J. Gibson (1980), p. xvii
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Notes to Chapter 5
loc. cit., in chapter 2, “The peculiarity of pictures”, p. 32 (emphasis in the text). See also, e.g., Gregory (1974), section 54, “The speaking eye”: “Pictures are most odd. They have, perceptually, a kind of double reality: they exist as objects in their own right — and at the same time they represent quite other objects, in a different space and a different time. In this, pictures are like written sentences, which are both marks on paper and representatives of quite different things. This double reality is common to all symbols, and it presents a problem that only the human brain can solve…. The picture looks both flat and, in a way, three-dimensional — which is impossible for any object. Pictures are paradoxical, impossible, and yet by accepting them we became unique in nature” (p. 617). — Belonging to the tradition of J. J. Gibson, see, e.g., R. N. Haber in M. Hagen (Ed.) (1980): “… pictures have a dual reality. They can be perceived as flat objects in their own right, with certain shapes, brightnesses, contours, and colors, often a frame around them, etc. They also can be representative of some three-dimensional reality in which the flatness and frame are ignored and the contours and colors are perceived quite differently. Perceivers can apparently extract either of these realities of pictures and go back and forth between the two easily. The dual reality of pictures is clearest for so-called representational pictures,especially photographs of natural scenes. Adult perceivers have little difficulty recognizing or matching such two-dimensional representations to the natural scenes that gave rise to them” (p. 15). See also Haber in C. F. Nodine and D. F. Fisher (Eds.) (1979): “A three-dimensional scene is normally perceived as three dimensional. It does not look like a painting. It has a three-dimensional reality. A representational picture of or? photograph has two realities. It has the two-dimensional reality of a flat picture surface, set in a frame, attached to a wall. It also has the three-dimensional reality of a scene in depth: we recognize all the objects and know their respective locations in space, that is, we perceive an accurate layout of space in a representational picture. Probably, the most important device that gives pictures three-dimensional reality is perspective” (p. 84); and: “In trying to revitalize a perspective theory of picture perception, I am making explicit that perceiving the layout of space in two-dimensional display is harder, not easier, than in three-dimensional scenes. Pictures may have one less dimension, but they have one more reality with which to contend, and it is reality that has always been hard to perceive” (p. 97). — In a very late text by J J. Gibson himself that figures as Foreword in Hagen (Ed.) (1980), there are intriguing statements about “picture perception” that point precisely, as I understand them, in the direction that will here be further pursued. In this “Prefatory Essay on the Perception of Surfaces versus the Perception of Markings on a Surface”, Gibson writes: “The perception of surfaces, I argue, is radically different from the perception of markings on a surface…. Surfaces and what they afford are actually perceived. Pictured surfaces, objects, places, persons, and events are not actually perceived in the proper meaning of that term…. Perplexities…. I suggested that, strictly speaking, all we perceive directly are surfaces as such. If so, we should not speak of the perception of a picture but of a nonperceptual kind of apprehension… when it scil. the surface is treated so that it displays information about something other than a simple surface, the human observer gets a puzzling variety of new experiences. The displayed information can be about a real place or an imaginary one, an existing object somewhere else or a nonexisting object, a living animal or a mythical one, a past, present, or future event, or an impossible event…. The perplexities involved in making and looking at pictures are wide-ranging. They point to unanswered questions in psychology. What is direct perception as against mediated knowledge? What is a representation? What exactly should be meant by an image?… Most people think they know what a picture is. Anything so familiar must be simple. They are wrong” (pp. xi—xvii; emphasis in all quotes of this note partly mine).
The perhaps most important clarification is to be found in Hua XXIII (1980), Nr. 16 (1912), especially pp. 471ff. For a short systematic survey, see Marbach in Bernet, Kern, Marbach (1993), chapter 5, and for a historical discussion of Husserl’s view of “Bildbewusstsein ” (pictorial representation; depiction), see my Introduction in Hua XX III.
It may be worth noting that the important aspect of someone’s indirect referring in PIC x would be missed if it were understood in terms of “indirect perception”. As I see it, indirect perception takes place, for example, when I see as it were something in a mirror reflection (from a mirror on a wall or from any other reflecting surface) that I could, however, also directly,actually, perceive by turning around etc. In such a situation, I know that what is seen as it were in the mirror-image is also actually present and could thus be seen independently of the reflecting medium. By the way, it seems also rather natural to say to someone “I (can) see you” in the sense of “not directly though”, when I am looking at a mirror-image of the person. In view of a pictorial appearance of someone, in contrast, one may under given circumstances say something like “I see you”, but the emphasis will be on “you”, with the understanding “(I see you) not really though”. This may happen, for instance, in an answer to the question “what do you see here (in the picture)?”. However, what appears as it were in the pictorial situation is (normally, if it is at all) not accessible as it is in itself,as x, in practically the same situation, besides being given indirectly, as — Y.
See, e g., Hua XXIII (1980), Nr. 1(1904/05), §14, pp. 30f., in particular.
See, e. g, Hua XXIII (1980), Nr. 1 (1904/05), §19, pp. 40f; also Appendix L (around 1912), pp. 480f. especially. — See also, e.g., Gombrich (1977) for a discussion of trompe l’oeil art as striving, precisely, to create an illusion of reality (pp. 172–74 and pp. 233–35, especially).
See, e.g., Hua XXIII (1980), Nr. 19, “Reine Möglichkeit und Phantasie” (1922/23), pp. 546ff.; see, in particular, pp. 552f.: “… An individual cannot properly speaking be imagined fully and wholly…”; in the original German: “… Ein Individuum lässt sich eigentlich nicht voll and ganz fingieren…”. See also Appendix LXIII (1920/21).
I have explored this general ambiguity in an empirical study with three-to nine-year-old children. Some of the results will hopefully soon be made available in a forthcoming publication that I am currently preparing thanks to a grant from the Swiss National Foundation for Scientific Research.
See, e.g., C. Peacocke (1987) who appears to argue in favor of an experienced similarity; for instance, p. 386: “The silhouette both is and is experienced as a flat surface, or at least as occupying a plane: any description of the experience omitting this point is incomplete. Yet the cathedral itself is and is experienced as three-dimensional. Nevertheless, if the silhouette is successful, the following is true of the perceiver’s experience: the silhouette is presented in an area of the perceiver’s visual field which is experienced as similar in shape to the region of the visual field in which Salisbury Cathedral itself is presented when seen from a certain angle. The point is not just that the area of the visual field is thus similar in shape, but that it is experienced as being so” (emphasis partly mine). See also p. 402; and 407: “The intention-free notion of depiction has been elucidated in terms of various relations of experienced similarity: this is the sense in which the account I have offered has been essentially perceptual. No such elucidation is possible for the notion of meaning in any non-pictorial symbol system. There is no question of the inscription `dog’ having the meaning in English that it does in virtue of certain experiences of similarity between the region of the visual field in which the inscription is presented and the concept of being a dog (or anything else)” (emphasis partly mine; see also above in the body of the text, the end of section 5. 1 ).
See C. Peacocke (1987), discussing R. Wollheim’s attempt “to explain depiction by making reference to a particular kind of seeing, sometimes labelled `representational seeing’. Richard Wollheim in particular has long argued for such a view. In one of his more recent essays, he aims to analyze representational seeing in terms of what can be seen in a picture; and he also insists on a principle to which I have been trying to conform, that what is distinctive of depiction must draw upon and be integrated into a more general theory of perception”. In that context, Peacocke also draws attention to N. Goodman’s complaining “that the notion of what we can see in a picture is unclear” (see Goodman (1972), pp. 124–125, emphasis mine), and Peacocke adds that his “present paper could be seen as an attempt to remove any obscurity” (p. 401, and note 24 on the same page).
See M. Black (1972) for further critical comments on such views; pp. 117–125, in particular.
See also, e.g., N. Goodman (1976), I,9, “Depiction and Description”, pp. 41f., in particular: “To represent, a picture must function as a pictorial symbol; that is, function in a system such that what is denoted depends solely upon the pictorial properties of the symbol”. Note that Goodman, on his account plausibly so, is able to add that a “rough distinction between pictorial and other properties” will be useful, but that “nothing very vital rests on its precise formulation” (p. 42, note 34; emphasis mine). Phenomenologically, in contrast, the specification of the sense of “pictorial properties” proves to be vital, indeed, as I hope to make clear in the body of the text. I am puzzled by Goodman’s proposal of a “pictorial characterization” concerning “pictures” which is this: “An elementary pictorial characterization states what color a picture has at a given place on its face. Other pictorial characterizations in effect combine many such elementary ones by conjunction, alternation, quantification, etc. Thus a pictorial characterization may name the colors at several places, or state that the color at one place lies within a certain range, or state that the colors at two places are complementary, and so on. Briefly, a pictorial characterization says more or less completely and more or less specifically what colors the picture has at what places. And the properties correctly ascribed to a picture by pictorial characterization are its pictorial properties”. True, Goodman himself adds that the proposed specification of pictorial properties “has many shortcomings, among them the absence of provision for the often three-dimensional nature of picture surfaces” (p. 42, and note 34 on the same page, emphasis mine). Well, is the given specification in terms of “what colors the picture has at what places” not exactly also ascribable to any other real material perceptually given object? But then, what really is specific about pictures? As regards “the absence of provision for the often three-dimensional nature of picture surfaces”, on the other hand, it seems to me that providing one would lead to the notion of the “pictorial object” which, no doubt, would prove troublesome within Goodman’s framework.
See, e.g., Hua XXIII (1980), Nr. 1 (1904/05), §9; Appendix II (1898); Nr. 17, “Zur Lehre vom Bildbewusstsein and Fiktumbewusstsein”, sections a) and b) (1912), especially.
See Hua XXIII (1980), Nr. 17 (1912), p. 488, in particular.
See Hua XXIII (1980), Appendix V (1905), p. 143: “das Räumliche muss es sein, die Farbe genügt nicht: warum?”, and: “Warum muss die Plastik das Fundament des Bildbewusstseins ausmachen?”.
See. e.g., G. Boehm (1988) for an instructive discussion of such techniques in the case of Cézanne, no doubt one of the painters that philosophers most cherish!
See, e.g., Hua XXIII (1980), Appendix V (1905), p. 143 especially.
Compare Hua XXIII (1980), Appendix LII (1910), where Husserl comments on a remark by W. Schapp regarding the fact that “color cannot properly be painted (color as such, more precisely speaking)”; in the original German: “Eine Farbe kann man eigentlich nicht malen (Farbe als solche, genauer gesprochen)”, p. 494.
If I read him correctly, Goodman (1976) would seem to use “sculptural properties” such as “shape” in relation to “sculptures” only, in contrast to pictures whose characteristic “pictorial property” is that of color (p. 42; see also note 11 above, in this chapter).
However, the partial moment of (PER)y in the phenomenological form of PIC x may be different in its unfolding with sculptures and with pictures, respectively: I can explore a statue from different angles,whereas with pictures such changes of position are much more limited. Moreover, with pictures perhaps more strikingly than with three-dimensional sculptures, there often are good reasons to talk of a standard or normal viewer position in relation to which the pictorial object is meant to be “seen”. Compare, e.g., Hua XXIII, Nr. 17, section b) (1912), where Husserl makes interesting remarks concerning the picture and its orientation relative to the thinglike physical picture and to the double object “pictorial object-depicted object”, pp. 491f.
For a recent very instructive and thoughtful presentation of philosophical theories of pictorial representation, see also O. R. Scholz (1991). In Marbach (forthcoming), I try to develop my view concerning the character of unreality (Schein) in pictorial representation in more detail.
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Marbach, E. (1993). The Phenomenological Form of Pictorial Representation. In: Mental Representation and Consciousness. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2239-1_6
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