Is it ever bad to take pleasure in the suffering of fictional characters? I think so. I attempt to show when and why. I begin with two powerful objections to my view: (1) engaging with fiction is akin to morally unproblematic autonomous fantasy, and (2) since no one is harmed, it is morally unproblematic. I reply to the objections and defend a Moorean view on the issue: It is intrinsically bad to enjoy evil, actual (past, present, or future) and merely (...) imagined. In support, I offer four examples. Then I argue against Moore's claim that it is equally bad to delight in fictional suffering as it is to enjoy actual suffering. Finally, I argue that even though it is bad to enjoy imagined suffering, the power of fiction is often mitigating. The moral problems are more often with the works of fiction than with the audience. (shrink)

It is commonly held, even among non-Bazinians, that photographs are typically perceived as more objective than other forms of depiction. The implications of this putative feature of photographic reception for the fiction film have been relatively ignored. If photos do have an objective purport, it would explain the power of a common device used in horror movies where a monster is selectively revealed through a degraded image, usually an amateur video recording. However, I argue that a better explanation is forthcoming. (...) It is not the objective purport of photographs that accounts for the peculiar power of these scenes, but the power of our imaginations to picture monsters far more terrifying than those that can be readily depicted. This gives us reason to be skeptical of the idea that the objective purport of photographs contributes significantly to the reception of fiction films. (shrink)

We are told by philosophers that photographs are a distinct category of image because the photographic process is mind-independent. Furthermore, that the experience of viewing a photograph has a special status, justified by a viewer’s knowledge that the photographic process is mind-independent. Versions of these ideas are central to discussions of photography in both the philosophy of art and epistemology and have far-reaching implications for science, forensics and documentary journalism. Mind-independence (sometimes ‘belief independence’) is a term employed to highlight what (...) is important in the idea that photographs can be produced naturally, mechanically, accidentally or automatically. Insofar as the process is physical, natural, mechanical or causal it can occur without human agency or intervention, entirely in the absence of intentional states. Presented innocuously, the idea is that although photographs are dependent on natural or mechanical processes, they can be produced independently of human agency – particularly human beliefs. Presented in a stronger form, the claim is that even if human agency is heavily involved in the production process, the definitive features that make the photograph a photograph and determine its salient properties are nonetheless independent of human minds. In epistemic debates, mind-independence is viewed as essential for explaining why photographs occupy a distinct category among images and justifying a variety of claims about their privileged epistemic and affective status in science, forensics, popular culture and journalism. But, in the philosophy of art, claims about mind-. (shrink)

Carl Plantinga; What a Documentary Is, After All, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 63, Issue 2, 15 April 2005, Pages 105–117, https://doi.org.

We intuitively make a distinction between _lying_ and _misleading_. On the explanation of this phenomenon favored here—the _adverbial_ account—the distinction tracks whether the content and its truth-committing force are literally conveyed. On an alternative _commitment_ account, the difference between lying and misleading is predicated instead on the strength of assertoric commitment. One lies when one presents with full assertoric commitment what one believes to be false; one merely misleads when one presents it without full assertoric commitment, by merely hinting or (...) otherwise implying it. Now, as predicted by the well-supported assumption that we can also assert with pictures, the lying/misleading distinction appears to intuitively show up there too. Here I’ll explain how the debate confronting the two accounts plays out both in general and in that case, aiming to provide support for the adverbial account. (shrink)

In this article we introduce the concept of implied optical perspective in deep learning computer vision systems. Taking the BBC's experimental television programme “Made by Machine: When AI met the Archive” as a case study, we trace a conceptual and material link between the system used to automatically “watch” the television archive and a specific type of photographic practice. From a computational aesthetics perspective, we show how deep learning machine vision relies on photography, its technical regimes and epistemic advantages, and (...) we propose a novel way to identify the latent camera through which the BBC archive was seen by machine. (shrink)

Are we really sure to correctly know what do we feel in front ofan artwork and to correctly verbalize it? How do we know what weappreciate and why we appreciate it? This paper deals with the problem ofintrospective opacity in aesthetics (that is, the unreliability of self-knowledge) in the light of traditional philosophical issues, but also of recentpsychological insights, according to which there are many instances ofmisleading intuition about one’s own mental processes, affective states orpreferences. Usually, it is assumed that (...) aesthetic statements are intuitivelyclear and self-evident. However, a long tradition in psychological researchhas called the idea of introspective transparency and the infallibility of self-knowledge into question (Wilson 2002). This topic has only recently beenrecognized as an interesting problem in aesthetics (Melchionne 2011, Irvin2014). In this paper I will discuss the main shortcomings in introspective self-knowledge, mostly referring to psychological findings. As a consequence, thedevelopment of a folk psychological account of aesthetic experience could beneeded, investigating how people develop intuitive and naïve theories abouttheir aesthetic reactions, taste, and feelings, distinct from a more objectiveand empirically grounded account of how judgment and preferences areactually formed in ourselves, even on a neurobiological level. However, itwill also be argued that bypassing the individual judgment and his expressedchoices in favor of allegedly more objective levels of description would notbe an innocent step to take. (shrink)

[full article, abstract in English; only abstract in Lithuanian] Walton’s thesis of transparency of photographs has spurred much dispute among critics. One of the popular objections is spatial agnosticism, an argument that concerns the inertia of egocentric spatial information vis-a-vis a photograph. In this paper, I argue that spatial agnosticism fails. Spatial agnostics claim, for a wrong reason, that a photographic image cannot carry egocentric spatial information. I argue that it is the disjuncture of the photographic world in which the (...) depicted object situated from the space in which the viewer of the photograph resides that renders the photograph spatially agnostic. It is the timeless photographic world rather than the photographic object that renders egocentric spatial information inert. With this new formulation of spatial agnosticism, I propose that spatial agnosticism needs to be coupled with the temporal dimension in the efforts to refute the thesis of transparency of photographs. (shrink)

Some objects we value because they afford a felt connection with people, events, or places connected with their past. Visiting Canterbury cathedral, you encounter the place where, in 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered by four knights of Henry II. Knowing that you are standing in the very place where Becket’s blood was spilled gives the past event a sense of tangible reality. One feels ‘in touch with’ the past; history seems to ‘come alive’. In this paper, I propose an (...) explanation for the phenomenology of such experiences in terms of an imaginative activity that represents what an object is historically connected with as part of the object in the present. One imagines of the site of Becket’s murder Becket being murdered. According to my account, objects that embody their histories are representations in Kendall Walton’s sense: they have the function of serving as props in games of make-believe. (shrink)

The recent proliferation of deepfakes and other digitally produced deceptive representations has revived the debate on the epistemic robustness of photography and other mechanically produced images. Authors such as Rini (2020) and Fallis (2021) claim that the proliferation of deepfakes pose a serious threat to the reliability and the epistemic value of photographs and videos. In particular, Fallis adopts a Skyrmsian account of how signals carry information (Skyrms, 2010) to argue that the existence of deepfakes significantly reduces the information that (...) images carry about the world, which undermines their reliability as a source of evidence. In this paper, we focus on Fallis’ version of the challenge, but our results can be generalized to address similar pessimistic views such as Rini’s. More generally, we offer an account of the epistemic robustness of photography and videos that allows us to understand these systems of representation as continuous with other means of information transmission we find in nature. This account will then give us the necessary tools to put Fallis’ claims into perspective: using a richer approach to animal signaling based on the signaling model of communication (Maynard-Smith and Harper, 2003), we will claim that, while it might be true that deepfake technology increases the probability of obtaining false positives, the dimension of the epistemic threat involved might still be negligible. (shrink)

Are there nonfiction genres of theater scripts, just as there are nonfiction genres of film, such as documentary, and of literature, such as biography and history? I propose that there are, and that Verbatim Theater qualifies as a nonfiction theater genre. What sets it apart is that it is supposed to instruct performers not merely to reenact, or represent, a series of events, but overall to present evidence or arguments for a thesis, or for the audience to draw their own (...) conclusions. For scripts to present evidence, audiences have to be able to filter out what is supposed to serve as evidence from what else occurs on stage. Unlike various other genres of theater that one might initially appear to be nonfiction—such as autobiographical dialogues, Documentary Theater, and ethnodrama—Verbatim Theater does this. (shrink)

The main accounts of the documentary in contemporary analytic aesthetics have difficulties in dealing with the distinction between documentaries and docudramas. On the one hand, the assertion-based accounts proposed by Noël Carroll, Trevor Ponech, and Carl Plantinga cannot properly differentiate documentaries from docudramas. On the other hand, Gregory Currie's account can do so by relying on the notion of trace, but this involves an undesirable side effect, namely, the exclusion, from the documentary, of those documentaries that do not include traces (...) of their subjects, as, for instance, documentaries that resort to reenactment. Is there a way to exclude docudramas from the documentary without also excluding other films that we usually treat as documentaries? This article affirmatively answers by relying on the notion of perceptual belief, that is, a belief that one can form by endorsing the demonstrative content of one's perception. While documentaries primarily involve the formation of perceptual beliefs, docudramas invite us to form nonperceptual beliefs by primarily involving the formation of perceptual imaginings. That is why docudramas are not documentaries. By contrast, a documentary that resorts to reenactment primarily involves the formation of perceptual beliefs, namely, perceptual beliefs about the reenactment itself. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the relationship that exists between two distinct and seemingly incompatible bodies of scholarship within the field of contemporary philosophy of technology. The first, as argued by postmodern pragmatist Barry Allen, posits that our tools and what we make with them are epistemically important; disputing the idea that knowledge is strictly sentential or propositional, he claims instead that knowledge is the product of a performance that is both superlative and artefactual, rendering technology importantly world-constituting. The second, as argued (...) by Heidegger and his inheritors, is that technology is ontologically problematic; rather than technology being evidence of performative knowledge, it is instead existentially threatening by virtue of the fact that it changes the tenor of our relationship with the world-as-given. Despite the fact that these claims seem prima facie incompatible, I argue that they may be successfully reconciled by introducing a third body of scholarship: the philosophy of photography. For it is the case, I argue, that although we, qua human beings, occupy lifeworlds that are necessarily constituted by technology, technology also induces a kind of phenomenological scepticism: a concern that mediated action precludes us from the possibility of authentic experience. Arguing in favour of the sentiment that photographs serve as a kind of phenomenal anchor—a kind of machine for living—I claim that photographic images provide a panacea to this existential concern: despite being epistemically problematic, it is this selfsame epistemic “specialness” of photographs that forces us to phenomenologically recommit, if only temporarily, to the world in a serious way. Consequently, it is my belief that an analysis of our artefacts and the way they function is fundamentally incomplete without an analysis of the epistemic and ontological problems introduced of the photographic image; as I will demonstrate, the photographic image casts an extremely long shadow over the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

While historians of art have found death masks and life casts conceptually problematic, it is also noteworthy that these objects have received scant attention from philosophers of art. In this paper, I begin to redress this omission by offering examples of how the philosophy of art can help us understand these images. Two problems stand out: the problem of representation, for example, what type of representation a death mask is; and the problem of style and historicity, for example, whether images (...) imprinted from nature can indicate styles, and whether these images can evolve and transform along art-historical lines. After considering these problems, I conclude that these images are constrained in what they can and cannot represent. While there is a long tradition of imprinting from nature, this practice shows little discernible change over time. An unchanging tradition cannot claim to exhibit a history, at least in a narrative sense familiar to art history. The following investigation opens a dialog between Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art and practitioners of theoretical art history, including Ernst Gombrich and Georges Didi-Huberman, both of whom offer differing views on how these images can be treated. (shrink)

Photography is valued as a medium for recording and visually reproducing features of the world. I seek to challenge the view that photography is fundamentally a recording process and that every photograph is a record—a view that I claim is based on a ‘single-stage’ misconception of the process. I propose an alternative, ‘multi-stage’ account in which I argue that causal registration of light is not equivalent to recording and reproducing an image. Intervention or non-intervention by photographers is more sophisticated than (...) the traditional view allows. Using the multi-stage account, I describe four models for producing photographic images and pictures. (shrink)

What do pictures and mental images have in common? The contemporary tendency to reject mental picture theories of imagery suggests that the answer is: not much. We show that pictures and visual imagery have something important in common. They both contribute to mental simulations: pictures as inputs and mental images as outputs. But we reject the idea that mental images involve mental pictures, and we use simulation theory to strengthen the anti-pictorialist's case. Along the way we try to account for (...) caricature and for some basic features of pictorial representations. (shrink)

Diarmuid Costello ha defendido recientemente una versión fuerte de lo que él llama, siguiendo a Dominic Lopes, La nueva teoría de la fotografía y ha criticado una versión anterior de esta nueva teoría, que él considera más débil y restringida. Ambas posiciones —radical y restringida— se oponen a la visión tradicional en filosofía analítica de la fotografía. Sin embargo, Costello sostiene que la posición débil está aún demasiado cerca de esta tradición. Este artículo defiende la posición débil y argumenta que (...) la supuesta versión fuerte es más prescriptiva, restrictiva e inadecuada. (shrink)

Nous voulons montrer que les théories générales de la dépiction et les théories de la photographie diffèrent dans la manière dont elles ont jusqu’à présent mobilisé (ou non) la notion de ressemblance. En insistant sur la différence entre peinture et photographie, et sur la photographie en tant qu’ensemble de produits (les images photographiques) plutôt que sur la photographie en tant que technologie de production d’images, la plupart des théories existantes de la photographie se sont empêchées de comprendre quel est le (...) rôle exact de la ressemblance dans la dépiction photographique. Nous soulignons ce fait et suggérons qu’une distinction entre détection et dépiction est essentielle pour permettre le renouvellement de la philosophie de la photographie. (shrink)

Film audiences are no longer in a position to know for certain which images, or features of images they see on the screen were created by photography and which were created in a computer. Yet they are reacting to the advent of computer graphics as if it is merely a technical improvement, not a change in the nature of film itself. This would mean that one of the most influential early theories of film—realism—is wrong. It held that film is by (...) nature photographic and that its unique value is to afford the audience the physical connection with reality that photography, uniquely among pictorial media, brings. I argue that the audience is right about this. Even as applied to purely photographic films, realism was simply a mistake. (shrink)

Nous voulons montrer que les théories générales de la dépiction et les théories de la photographie diffèrent dans la manière dont elles ont jusqu’à présent mobilisé la notion de ressemblance. En insistant sur la différence entre peinture et photographie, et sur la photographie en tant qu’ensemble de produits plutôt que sur la photographie en tant que technologie de production d’images, la plupart des théories existantes de la photographie se sont empêchées de comprendre quel est le rôle exact de la ressemblance (...) dans la dépiction photographique. Nous soulignons ce fait et suggérons qu’une distinction entre détection et dépiction est essentielle pour permettre le renouvellement de la philosophie de la photographie. (shrink)

There is a sustained phenomenological tradition of describing the character of photographic pictorial experience to consist in part of a feeling of contact with the subject of the photograph. Philosophers disagree, however, about the exact cause of the ‘contact phenomenon’ and whether there is a difference in the phenomenal character between the pictorial experiences of photographs and handmade pictures so that, if a viewer mistakes the type that a token image belongs to, their sense of contact can alter. I argue (...) that the contact phenomenon is contingent upon, and triggered by, the viewer’s perceptual experience of the image, which may be subject to change depending upon how a viewer attends to an image. I develop a hybrid account to resolve how the perceptual and cognitive aspects of a viewer’s experience interact and produce the complex phenomenology, including conflicting mental states, that a viewer can undergo during the described experiences. (shrink)