The Epistemic Status of Photographs and Paintings: A Response to Cohen and Meskin (original) (raw)

Why do photographs occupy an epistemically privileged status among types of depictions? As Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin put it: "Why are photographs epistemically special in a way that other sorts of depictive representations are not? (Why, for example, do photographs but not paintings carry evidentiary weight?)" 1 Orthodoxy on this matter has it that the answer has to do with the nature of the causal relation that photographs bear to their subjects. In a series of articles, Cohen and Meskin have proposed a rich and novel answer to the above question that, as I read it, bucks this orthodoxy. Cohen and Meskin's account of photography's epistemic value, in addition to referencing the nature of the relation that photographs bear to their subjects, references viewers' background beliefs about photographs as well. 2 While this gives their account of photography's epistemic value a degree of sophistication and nuance that other ones may lack, it seems to me that what Cohen and Meskin have added thereby renders their account internally unstable. I According to Cohen and Meskin, photographs are epistemically special because "(1) token photographs are spatially agnostic sources of information, and (2) viewers hold background beliefs about the category of photographs that influence their attitudes towards the epistemic status of viewed token photographs." 3 This is a lot to unpack and (1) further decomposes into two claims. The first of these claims in (1) is that photographs are epistemically valuable because they transmit information about visually accessible properties of their subjects, such as color and shape properties, what Cohen and Meskin call 'vinformation.' 4 However, photographs are alleged by Cohen and Meskin to transmit v-information in a manner independent of their transmitting egocentric spatial information (information about where,