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

On the epistemic value of photographs

2004

Many have held that photographs give us a firmer epistemic connection to the world than do other depictive representations. 2 To take just one example, Bazin famously claimed that “[t] he objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making.” 3 Unfortunately, while the intuition in question is widely shared, it has remained poorly understood. In this paper we propose to explain the special epistemic status of photographs.

The epistemology of the photographic image

A short note on the epistemology of the photographic image It seems odd to justify at the beginning of the third millenium the act of taking pictures by a camera. After all the camera accompanies western civilization since mid 19 th century and took over as the major means of representing reality. And yet, even though we are not overwhelmed and shocked by the magic of the camera as did the pioneers of photography and of the cinema, among them were Antoine Claudet, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Eadweard Muybridge, George Melies, the Lumiere brothers, and many others, who have skillfully constructed strange and extremely complicated machines, we are still up to these days amazed and fascinated by pictures produced by this technology.

Data vs. Matter: What Photography Can Teach us about Mental Images

The debate over the existence and nature of mental images is ages old. Through its history this debate turned quite technical and complex, but here I wish to strip it from its technical form, go back to its roots and try to shed new light on the matter with the aid of photography. Both sides of the debate on whether mental images exist can be grasped quite intuitively. The argument for the existence of mental images surely draws much of its power from intuition – we all experience mental images, we can imagine visual objects at will, have visual recollections and so on. But the case against mental images also draws from intuition – we can sense that mental images are different from other images, are “less clear”, “less stable”, elusive perhaps. This feeling is strengthened when one’s mental images are put under interrogation. If we are asked to imagine a dog, for instance, and do so, we may still find it difficult to answer questions about the looks of the dog, let alone the background against which it appears in the supposed “image”. I will suggest in this paper that mental images do not exist, or at the very least that our appeals to them are flawed and illusory, but in joining this side of the debate over the existence of mental images I will draw relatively little from the current discussions of the matter in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience, and will instead make a broader appeal to photography, esp. to artistic practices that investigate vision and representation through photography. The discussion will follow these lines: I open by making some further comments on the appeals of mental images (section 1). This is important because we need to always keep in mind that abolishing mental images from our vocabulary comes at a high price. In section 2 I discuss some general features of photographs. I will use photographs to draw more attention to the difference between how photographs are experienced and how mental images are supposed to be experienced. More specifically I will suggest that mental images cannot be replaced with photographs, although we intuit them as such. In section 3 I contrast the view of photography as representation (section 3.1) and as ‘data’ (section 3.2) with the view that photography is an indexical physical sign that requires physical stratum to be actualized. I suggest we reject the view of photography as a ‘nonmaterial, representational image’, and following, suggest that the notion of ‘image’ (in ‘mental image’) is itself incoherent.

Photographic Phenomenology as Cognitive Phenomenology

British Journal of Aesthetics, 2015

Photographic pictorial experience is thought to have a peculiar phenomenology to it, one that fails to accompany the pictorial experiences one has before so-called 'handmade' pictures. I present a theory that explains this in terms of a common factor shared by beliefs formed on the basis of photographic pictorial experience and beliefs formed on the basis of ordinary, face-to-face, perceptual experience: the having of a psychologically immediate, non-inferential etiology. This theory claims that photographic phenomenology has less to do with photographs themselves, or the pictorial experiences they elicit, and is a matter of our cognitive response to those experiences. I illustrate this theory's benefits: it is neutral on the nature of photography and our folk-conception of photography; it is consistent with photographic phenomenology's being contingent; and it accounts for our experiences of hyperrealistic handmade pictures. Extant theories of photographic phenomenology falter on one or more of these issues.

The particularity of photographic experience

Theoria, 2023

A common view in the philosophy of perception holds that states of seeing objects face to face have particular contents. When you see, say, a dog face to face, your visual state represents the particular dog that is in front of you. In this paper, I argue for a related claim about states of seeing objects in conventional photographs. When you see a dog in a photograph, for example, your visual state represents the particular dog that was in front of the camera when the photograph was taken, that is, the photograph's depictum. The argument in this paper proceeds in two steps. In the first step, I discuss states of seeing objects face to face. I argue that such a state represents the particular object whose surface is responsible for the optical information that the visual system uses to construct the state's attributive representational content. In the second step, I apply the result of this discussion to states of seeing objects in photographs. I argue that a state of seeing an object in a photograph has a particular content that represents the object that was in front of the camera when the photograph was taken. 10 I will explain what I mean by attributive content shortly. 11 Arguments in favor of the claim that visual states have contents have been provided, for example,

Fixing the Image: Re-thinking the 'Mind-independence' of Photographs

We are told by philosophers that photographs are ‘mind-independent’. In epistemic debates, mind-independence is viewed as essential for explaining why photographs occupy a distinct category among images. It also justifies a variety of claims about their privileged epistemic and affective status in science, forensics, popular culture and journalism. But, in the philosophy of art, this position has fuelled scepticism: if photographs are mind-independent they are not intimately bound to the intentional states of an artist. In this article I argue that we can address scepticism in the philosophy of art by overcoming dogmatism in the epistemology of photography. I offer a substantive account of the photographic process and clarify the difference between photographs as images and photographs as pictures. Using this account, I show that it is unnecessary to treat mind-independence as a defining feature of photographs. This opens space to understand that a skilled photographer can create pictures, not just images, by using objects and light sources analogous to a painter using brushes and paint.

Photographs Are Immediate and Unadulterated Articulations of the Truth

It has been said that "a photo is worth a thousand words."1 The thought here is that a single picture is sufficient to show an idea so complicated that hundreds of words are required to do it justice If this is so, then photographs which are immediate and unadulterated articulations of the truth seen by the camera, ought to be the superb and unequaled medium for expressing truth.2 Photos contain a wealth of information which may be used effectively in historical research. Visual materials might be utilized as evidence, for illustration, for comparison and contrast, and for analytical purposes. To some degree confounding is the moderately negligible utilization of photos as primary sources in historical inquiry. Many visual clues exist which can help to explain the historical cases in specific areas. Photographs help our comprehension of an occasion by catching the scene; and if witnessing something first hand is the only way to accept something that's difficult to believe, at that point photos show reality.3 The term 'photograph examination's introduced here alludes to different visual research strategies with the appropriation of photos. The survey of the writing has portrayed that fusing a visual angle into inquire about utilizing photos is beneficial in investigations of exceptionally unique or complex marvels either subjectively or quantitatively, or both. Methods in visual research are chiefly qualitative, but often involve qualitative quantification or quantitative elements by design.4 As far as photograph examination, some visual specialists have given different ways to deal with the utilization and investigation of photos.5 As per those analysts, visual information, for example, photos can be utilized for documentation, affirmation of literary