Seeing-In as Aspect Perception (original) (raw)
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Seeing-in an image: Husserl and Wollheim on pictorial representation revisited
Studies on Art and Architecture, 2020
This paper proposes a parallel between the theories of pictorial representation put forward by Edmund Husserl and Richard Wollheim. By doing so, it aims at facilitating a dialogue that can provide some new elements for an appropriate understanding of threefold seeing-in. The first section offers a comprehensive interpretation of Husserl's theory of image-consciousness. This experience is considered a threefold perceptual phantasy, different from perception and sign-consciousness. The second section presents a review of Wollheim's theory of twofold seeing-in and addresses a possible ambiguity in his notion of 'thing represented'. Finally, the third section discusses two topics that result from this parallel: first, the characteristics of the configurational and recognitional folds in seeing-in experience, and second, the possibility of their 'mixture' with phantasy. As a result, I propose a different account of threefold seeing-in: I suggest that the configurational and the recognitional folds should be taken as 'aspects' or 'intentions' of seeing-in, and that the configurational aspect corresponds to the intention to the image-object.
Pictorial Experience and Aesthetic Appreciation: Wollheim Reassessed and Vindicated
The Pleasure of Pictures. Pictorial Experience and Aesthetic Appreciation, 2018
Notoriously, Richard Wollheim has claimed that seeing-in is a distinctive twofold perceptual experience a) that constitutes our experience of pictures and b) whose shareable entertainment on suitable perceivers' part provides necessary and sufficient conditions for a picture's having a certain figurative value. In this paper, first, I will focus on the question of whether Wollheim's first claim, which obviously is a precondition of his second claim, is correct, in spite of the several critiques it received. Sympathetic critiques admit that seeing-in is the pictorial experience, yet they say that it must be cashed out in terms altogether different from Wollheim's admittedly elusive ones, possibly by denying twofoldness a psychological reality. The unsympathetic critiques instead say that seeing-in does not provide either necessary or sufficient conditions of pictorial experience. By suitably reconceptualizing it, I will try to rescue Wollheim's claim from both kinds of critiques. In a nutshell, seeing-in is a distinctive twofold perceptual experience only insofar as i) in its configurational fold (CF) one grasps suitably enriched design properties of the picture's vehicle; namely, properties including the vehicle's grouping properties, the ways for the vehicle's elements to be arranged along a certain direction in a certain dimension; ii) this enrichment allows the recognitional fold (RF) of that experience to be the knowingly illusory seeing the vehicle as another thing, namely, the seen-in threedimensional scene. Second, I will try to show that once seeing-in is so reconceived, one may explain how is it that on its basis one may aesthetically appreciate a picture. For there are different ways of appreciating a picture depending on which design properties – the vehicle's properties that are responsible for the fact that a certain scene is seen in the picture – are selected by means of attention while already being overall phenomenally aware of the picture's vehicle in the CF. Such properties are either mere design properties, i.e., properties that are merely responsible for the fact that a certain threedimensional scene is seen in the picture, insofar as they present the corresponding properties that in the RF are ascribed to the protagonists of that scene. Typically, mere design properties are the vehicle's colors and shapes. Or they are extradesign properties, i.e., properties that are also responsible for the fact that such a scene emerges in the picture, hence can be recognized in it: the vehicle's grouping properties again. Indeed, a certain kind of pictorial appreciation depends on attentionally selecting extradesign properties, insofar as they enable one to recognize such a scene's protagonists independently of whether they are (correctly) presented in the relevant picture. Another kind of pictorial appreciation instead depends on attentionally selecting mere design properties, insofar as their instantiation in the picture's vehicle is intentionally produced in order to conceal their presentational role, so as to let one primarily focus on the properties ascribed (in the RF) to the scene's protagonists that in actual fact are however presented by those mere design properties.
The Philosophical Review, 2001
How do pictures represent? In this book Robert Hopkins casts new light on an ancient question by connecting it to issues in the philosophies of mind and perception. He starts by describing several striking features of picturing that demand explanation. These features strongly suggest that our experience of pictures is central to the way they represent, and Hopkins characterizes that experience as one of resemblance in a particular respect. He deals convincingly with the objections traditionally assumed to be fatal to resemblance views, and shows how his own account is uniquely well placed to explain picturing's key features. His discussion engages in detail with issues concerning perception in general, including how to describe phenomena that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists, and the book concludes with an attempt to see what a proper understanding of picturing can tell us about that deeply mysterious phenomenon, the visual imagination.
On the Apparent Incompatibility of Perceptual and Conventional Accounts of Pictures
Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2022
What are pictures ? To answer this question, one of the most successful approaches is what has been called the perceptual account. On this approach, pictures are fundamentally characterized by the way they are perceived by subjects. This principle can for example be fleshed out by claiming that pictures foster a specific type of twofold perceptual experience in subjects. By contrast, another type of account, that I shall call conventional account, is somewhat neglected nowadays because it appears as insufficient to distinguish pictures from other kinds of representations. These two types of accounts are often presented as incompatible. However, it is not obvious in what sense they are so. The aim of this paper is thus twofold. Firstly, to precisely identify the differences between the perceptual and the conventional accounts of pictures. Secondly, to suggest that there might still be a role for the conventional account. To provide support for this view, I will show that the perceptual and conventional accounts may not have the same explananda, leaving open the possibility that a theory of depiction integrating both might be built.
When Wittgenstein claims that "the expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception's being unchanged" (Wittgenstein 1953: 196), he expresses a paradox that Gombrich (Gombrich 1960) modifies in this way: (a 1) the observer x perceives a picture P under a new aspect; (b 1) if x perceives P under a new aspect then x's perception of P has changed; (c 1) but x's perception of P has not actually changed. I argue that the Gombrich's version of the paradox has become the core of the problem of the pictorial representation. As I will explain, different approaches to depiction solve the paradox by denying one among (a 1)-(c 1). Gombrich rejects (c 1). Wollheim rejects (a 1). The so-called psychological theories of depiction also reject (a 1). Every theory of depiction should face what I call the Fictional Issue (FI) and the Representational Issue (RI). Attempting to solve FI and RI, I shall explore an alternative, Wittgensteinian solution, which implies to reject (b 1). To do this, we have to interpret the seeing-as as made of two kinds of perception: a simple perception and a representational perception.
TWOFOLDNESS AND THREE-LAYEREDNESS IN PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION
Estetika, 2018
In this essay, I defend a Wollheimian account of a twofold picture perception. While I agree with Wollheim's objectors that a picture involves three layers that qualify a picture in its complexity – its vehicle, what is seen in it, and its subject –, I argue that the third layer does not involve perception, even indirectly: what is seen in a picture constrains its subject to be a subject of a certain kind, yet it does not force the latter to be pictorially perceived, not even indirectly. So, even if a picture is three-layered, pictorial experience remains a twofold experience, as Wollheim claimed. Not only the proponents of threefoldness but also Wollheim himself, however, have not convincingly explained how the experience really is a perceptual experience; my Wollheimian account thus purports to reconceive the pictorial experience in properly perceptual terms.
Depiction, Pictorial Experience, and Vision Science
New Directions in the Philosophy of Perception, edited by C. Hill and B. McLaughlin, Philosophical Topics 44(2), 2016
Pictures are 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3D-scene-representing experiences from their viewers. In this essay, I argue that philosophers have tended to underestimate the relevance of research in vision science to understanding the nature of pictorial experience or ‘seeing-in’, to use Richard Wollheim’s familiar expression. Both the deeply entrenched methodology of virtual psychophysics as well as empirical studies of pictorial space perception provide compelling support for the view that seeing-in and seeing face-to-face are experiences of the same psychological, explanatory kind. I also show that an empirically informed account of seeing-in provides resources to develop a novel, resemblance-based account of depiction. According to what I call the deep resemblance theory, pictures work by presenting virtual models of objects and scenes in phenomenally 3D, pictorial space.
Pictorial Experience: Not So Special After All
Philosophical Studies, 2014
The central thesis (CT) that this paper upholds is that a picture depicts an object by generating in those who view the picture a visual experience of that object. I begin by presenting a brief sketch of intentionalism, the theory of perception in terms of which I propose to account for pictorial experience. I then discuss Richard Wollheim’s twofoldness thesis and explain why it should be rejected. Next, I show that the socalled unique phenomenology of pictorial experience is simply an instance of perceptual indeterminacy. Lastly, I discuss a phenomenon associated with pictures that could be considered a problem for CT, and account for it by invoking the thesis that visual experience is cognitively penetrable.