Metaphor

Pictures can be used metaphorically. Many non-standard uses of pictures have been inaccurately classified as metaphorical. In addition, many seemingly metaphorical uses of pictures might not be that because they are used along with language. So, the first part of the chapter isolates strictly pictorial metaphors as a phenomenon. The chapter then shows that a semantic account of metaphor due to Josef Stern (2000) tidily accounts for these uses. This semantic operation is related to Kaplan’s dthat, but it does not yield a new singular content. Instead, it yields a new attributive content. In this way, pictures can be used to represent all manner of qualities that cannot figure in ordinary pictorial contents.

Pictorial Dthat

Though pictorial content is purely attributive, in some contexts of use pictures have singular contents. One way in which this can happen is akin to Kaplan’s (1978) dthat operation. The attributive content of a picture can denote something in context, and that denotation can become a new pictorial content under the right circumstances. So, the pictorial content becomes a character, which, in context, delivers a new, singular content. Police sketches, postcard pictures, photo rosters, and some portraits illustrate this phenomenon. As with cases in the philosophy of language, these interpretations are established by considering cases of reasonable and unreasonable interpretation of different communicative acts. They show that in some cases pictures are used to deliver individuals, rather than to say this or that about some individual.

Iconography

Wherever one finds rich picture-making practices, one tends to find iconography. The painting of a well-dressed young woman standing next to a bladed wheel, for example, represents St Catherine of Alexandria. Iconographic interpretation is reading pictures as having singular contents, like St Catherine, but the operation that yields those contents is not dthat as described in Chapter 4. Instead, it is another operation defined over character and content. The pictorial content is searched for attributes, which deliver the individual associated with them as a new iconographic content. The structure of the operation is like dthat, in that a pictorial content becomes a character which determines a new content, but the means by which a new content is determined are different. This process allows pictures to represent not just people, but all manner of things, like abstracta, which have no visual appearances at all.

Character, Content, and Reference

Pictures are profitably understood as having character, content, and referents. All of these are kinds of meaning. Following Kaplan (1989), character is a function from a context to a content, and in different contexts, pictorial characters yield different pictorial contents. Content is a function from circumstances of evaluation to extensions. Pictorial content is purely attributive, in that it does not include particular individuals, and in that sense, it is like the content of a description. It is neither definite nor indefinite, but communicative uses of pictures can determine definiteness. Pictures can thus refer in the manner of definite or indefinite descriptions. This constitutes a semantic frame within which the rest of the book investigates varieties of pictorial meaning.

Pictures, Communication, and Meaning

This chapter provides an overview of the project. Pictures are used for communication, and the way they do this sheds light on their syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Pictures can have attributive and singular contents in many different ways. All of these pictorial meanings are built on a foundation of pictorial character and pictorial content. Unpacking these various meanings constitutes the meaning thread of the book, which is most prominent in Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6. In addition, it is impossible to understand the communicative uses to which pictures are put without understanding how pictures have meaningful parts, the focus of Chapters 3, 7, and 8. This chapter sketches both the meaning thread and the parts thread as a way of helping keep the whole project in view, while each subsequent chapter winds up being focused on a specific aspect of it.

Distinguishing Kinds by Parts

Chapter 3 claims that pictures have syntactic parts in a manner distinct from how linguistic expressions have them. Chapter 7 shows that maps and related representations have parts in much the same way. This chapter closes the book by suggesting that the most fundamental distinction between kinds of representation is found in how they have parts. Pictures and maps have inseparable syntactic parts, while linguistic representations only have separable syntactic parts. This provides a new understanding of how compositionality is relevant to pictures and maps, and it also offers a new perspective on what makes pictures non-propositional representations, even though they can be used to express propositions.

Parts of Pictures

Along with the semantic frame presented in Chapter 2, this chapter offers an account of pictures’ meaningful parts. Pictures have many features, and each is responsible for playing a different semantic role in pictorial interpretation. For this reason, it makes sense to identify picture parts with aspects of pictures, or features that they have, which are nevertheless not the most determinate features they have. Collectively, all of these features determine a picture’s content, but taken by themselves they can also be understood as representing some sub-part of the scene that the whole represents. This helps with understanding some communicative uses of pictures. In fact, all of the semantic operations discussed in other chapters can apply to parts of pictures, while other parts are treated differently. This greatly expands the range of meanings pictures can communicate.

Direct Reference in Pictures and Maps

Maps are not pictures, but they are closely related kinds of representation, which can teach us something about the uses of pictures. Maps say, of locations, that they are thus and so. They do this, according to most theories, by connecting their locations with locations at some other place. So, bare locations, which are parts of pictures and maps in the sense described in Chapter 3, can act like directly referring terms. In maps, this is standard, but it also happens in many pictures, like photographs, security camera footage, and the like. These pictures say, of a place, that it is thus and so. And they do this because different parts—their locations and the features at those locations—play different semantic roles. As a result, such pictures can be said to express propositions.