Postscript

The Postscript offers the beginning of an account of the point of artistic representation, if the main theory of the book is correct and fully general. What might the point of artistic representation in general be, if the Real-Likeness view applied to representation in all art forms? One point might be to provide a form of escapism: artistic representations would provide us with toy worlds into which we might escape: the details of this are explored a little here. But we might hope that artistic representations might help us to understand the real world; how they might do that is left unexplained.

Photography and the Real World

Does a paradox arise for photographs which is analogous to the Paradox of Painting presented in Chapter One? If it were right to think that what we saw in a photograph were the real-world things which were in front of the lens, then it would not. This chapter argues that this view (associated with Scruton and Walton), that photographs are ‘transparent’, is wrong, and that related views (such as Hopkins’s view that they enable ‘factive seeing-in’) are at best problematic; it is argued that these views all depend on a failure to understand the nature of photography. Once we understand photography better, it seems that an analogous paradox must arise for photographs.

The Paradox of Painting

This chapter presents an apparent paradox, that what we see in a portrait painting both seems to be a face and seems to be made of paint, and shows how the character of the dominant approaches to representational painting (found in the views of Gombrich, Wollheim, Walton, and resemblance theories) is revealed by their treatment of this paradox. It then argues that any acceptable solution to the paradox must respect a ‘Non-Distraction’ thesis about the relation between medium and content, according to which attention to the medium cannot inevitably be a distraction from attention to the content. It then argues that all of the major approaches to representational painting fail to respect this Non-Distraction Thesis.

Introduction

The Introduction introduces the main claims of the book. It presents a paradox which arises for each of the art forms discussed, beginning with the case of painting (where it can be seen in Magritte’s painting of a pipe). It then presents a Non-Distraction Thesis, according to which attention to the medium of an artistic representation cannot inevitably be a distraction from attending to the content: it is a constraint on any acceptable treatment of the paradox that it must be consistent with this Non-Distraction Thesis. Finally, the Introduction briefly characterizes the solution to the paradox which the book offers for the cases of paintings, photographs, and novels.

Paradox and Distraction in Novels

This chapter raises a Paradox of Novels which is exactly analogous to the Paradox of Painting raised in Chapter One. This paradox is used to bring out the character of the currently dominant approaches to novels—those which appeal to make-believe or imagination (Walton or Stock, for example), those which take characters to be abstract objects (Salmon), and hybrid views (Kripke, Thomasson). The paradox is also shown to underlie the more familiar ‘Paradox of Fiction’. It is argued that the Non-Distraction Thesis holds for novels, just as it does for paintings and photographs, and the currently dominant approaches are found to be unable to respect that thesis. The roots of the problem are found in orthodox approaches to the philosophy of language, so the chapter prepares the way for a questioning of that orthodoxy.

Transparency and Distraction in Photographs

This chapter argues that the Non-Distraction Thesis applies to photographs, just as it does to paintings. The main argument is that the key decisions of a photographer are compositional decisions, and composition requires that attention to the medium is not a distraction from attention to the content. Views (such as those of Scruton and Barthes) which might seem to be in tension with this are critically examined. The chapter then attempts to explain how there can be real likenesses in photographs—unified wholes which resemble real things of the relevant kinds. This involves some detailed consideration of the medium of photography, and a novel, though intuitive, view of the medium is provided.

Painted Things

This chapter first explains what has to be done in order to take the Paradox of Painting seriously, and then proposes a way of trying to make sense of it. First, we don’t have to introduce entities of any very unusual kind, or embrace an odd ontology. But secondly, we need to find a way of allowing that a painted face, for example, is in some serious way a face, even if it’s not a real face. This involves engaging with issues in linguistics (for example, the work of Partee) and in the nature of our response to paintings. It is proposed that the face we see in a painting is what I call a real likeness, a unified whole made of paint, which counts as being, in a way, a face, because it resembles a real face.

Real Characters

This chapter attempts to develop for the case of characters in novels the kind of Real-Likeness view developed for painted things in Chapter Two. It does this by developing a new view in the philosophy of language. First, it introduces the idea of non-transactional uses of language, which are not designed to get some everyday kind of task done. It is argued that this kind of use is found both in philosophy and in stage plays. Secondly, it develops a Real-Likeness view of the characters in stage plays, and argues that novels have narrators who are like such characters. And thirdly, it introduces the idea of verbal mimes, which are ways of using words to imitate real-world things. It is then argued that novels create real likenesses by means of verbal mimes. Finally, it is suggested that even proper names may be given a role in verbal mimes.