Picture, Image and Experience A Philosophical Inquiry [Hardcover]

This book proposes and defends an answer to the philosophical question of how pictures represent.This book is about how pictures represent. Do they, like words, depend on human conventions for their meaning, or do they instead exploit something else--perhaps by looking like what they represent? The problem is philosophical, but it has also interested psychologists and art historians. Robert Hopkins' study examines and criticizes the currently available answers to this question before proposing and defending one of its own, and concludes with an attempt to see what a proper understanding of picturing can tell us about that deeply mysterious phenomenon, the visual imagination.This book is about how pictures represent. Do they, like words, depend on human conventions for their meaning, or do they instead exploit something else--perhaps by looking like what they represent? The problem is philosophical, but it has also interested psychologists and art historians. Robert Hopkins' study examines and criticizes the currently available answers to this question before proposing and defending one of its own, and concludes with an attempt to see what a proper understanding of picturing can tell us about that deeply mysterious phenomenon, the visual imagination.This book is about how pictures represent. Do they, like words, depend on human conventions for their meaning, or do they instead exploit something else--perhaps by looking like what they represent? The problem is philosophical, but it has also interested psychologists and art historians. Robert Hopkins examines and criticizes the currently available answers to this question before proposing and defending one of his own, and concludes with an attempt to see what a proper understanding of picturing can tell us about that deeply mysterious phenomenon, the visual imagination.Introduction; 1. The question; 2. Some features to explain; 3. Outline shape; 4. A theory of depiction; 5. Misrepresentation; 6. Indeterminacy and interlƒœ