Theories of Pictorial Representation

  Goodman’s conventionalism
  Gibson’s information theory
  Danto on resemblance
  Schier’s recognition theory

 Issues

Is the relation between a picture and what it represents arbitrary?  What does that mean and why would someone hold it?  Problems with the theory?

Do we need mental/internal representations to recognize objects or spatial layouts in pictures?  What evidence is relevant to this question?

Is vision modular, or is it affected at every level by background knowledge?  Evidence and arguments?

Does picture recognition depend on resemblance?  Why or why not?

How is the content of a picture individuated; i.e. what makes one picture different from another in terms of what each represents?  If the answer is ‘what can be seen in it,’ and perception depends on mental representations, how is the content of a mental representation individuated?

Key terms and concepts

Solso:  schemata, top-down processing, bottom-up processing, stage,  lateral inhibition

Winner:  family resemblance, repleteness, depth cue, constructivism, texture gradient, novelty-preference and visual-preference paradigms, lateralization, over-learning/automatization.

Readings:  denotation, resemblance, realism, invariants, pictorial competence, indiscernibles, module, cognitive impenetrability, geons, parallel processing, natural generativity, causal theory of perception.
 
 
 
 
 

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