Argle. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: all things are material. Either holes are somehow material, or else there are no such things. Maybe a hole is the material hole-lining that, as we so misleadingly say, “surrounds” the hole; or else whatever ostensible reference we make to holes is secretly some other sort of language-game altogether, or it’s fictitious reference, or it’s just plain mistaken.

Intuitively, we often see absences. For example, if someone steals your laptop at a café, you may see its absence from your table. However, absence perception presents a paradox. On prevailing models of perception, we see only present objects and scenes (Marr, Gibson, Dretske). So, we cannot literally see something that is not present. This suggests that we never literally perceive absences; instead, we come to believe that something is absent cognitively on the basis of what we perceive. But this (...) cognitive explanation does not do justice to the phenomenology. Many experiences of absence possess immediate, perceptual qualities. One may further argue that the ability to detect certain absences confers strong adaptive advantage and therefore must be as primitive and fundamental to humans as seeing positive things. I argue that we can literally see absences; in addition to representing objects, perception represents absences of objects. I present a model of seeing absence based on visual expectations and a visual matching process. The phenomenon of seeing absence can thus serve as an adequacy-test for a theory of perceptual content. If experiences of absence are possible, then we have another reason (following Siegel) to reject the view that perceptual content is restricted to colors and shapes. Furthermore, if the proposed account is correct, then we have grounds for dissociating seeing absence from other imagery-based phenomena termed “perceptual presence-in-absence” (Noë, Macpherson). (shrink)

Photography is often said to be an essentially causal medium. This paper addresses the role of causality in photography and argues for three main claims: (i) a causal theory of photography does not force us to say that images of backlit objects are photographs of the back surfaces of the said objects (as Roy Sorensen would have it); rather, (ii), such images, I suggest, are photographs of the objects and what Alva Noë would call their ‘looks’; (iii) the notion of (...) ‘looks’ furnishes us with a way to move closer to an answer to the question of the appropriate causal relation in photography. (shrink)

It seems odd to say that photography is not a mode of representation. For a photograph has in common with a painting the property by which the painting represents the world, the property of sharing, in some sense, the appearance of its subject. Indeed, it is sometimes thought that since a photograph more effectively shares the appearance of its subject than a typical painting, photography is a better mode of representation. Photography might even be thought of as having replaced painting (...) as a mode of visual representation. Painters have felt that if the aim of painting is really to reproduce the appearances of things, then painting must give way to whatever means are available to reproduce an appearance more accurately. It has therefore been said that painting aims to record the appearances of things only so as to capture the experience of observing them and that the accurate copying of appearances will normally be at variance with this aim. Here we have the seeds of expressionism and the origin of the view that painting is somehow purer when it is abstract and closer to its essence as an art. Roger Scruton is the author of Art and Imagination, The Aesthetics of Architecture, The Meaning of Conservatism, From Descartes to Wittgenstein, and The Politics of Culture and Other Essays. (shrink)

That photography is a supremely realistic medium may be the commonsense view, but—as Edward Steichen reminds us—it is by no means universal. Dissenters note how unlike reality a photograph is and how unlikely we are to confuse the one with the other. They point to “distortions” engendered by the photographic process and to the control which the photographer exercises over the finished product, the opportunities he enjoys for interpretation and falsification. Many emphasize the expressive nature of the medium, observing that (...) photographs are inevitably colored by the photographer’s personal interests, attitudes, and prejudices.1 Whether any of these various considerations really does collide with photography’s claim of extraordinary realism depends, of course, on how that claim is to be understood.Those who find photographs especially realistic sometimes think of photography as a further advance in a direction which many picture makers have taken during the last several centuries, as a continuation or culmination of the post-Renaissance quest for realism.2 There is some truth in this. Such earlier advances toward realism include the development of perspective and modeling techniques, the portrayal of ordinary and incidental details, attention to the effects of light, and so on. From its very beginning, photography mastered perspective. Subtleties of shading, gradations of brightness nearly impossible to achieve with the brush, became commonplace. Photographs include as a matter of course the most mundane details of the scenes they portray—stray chickens, facial warts, clutters of dirty dishes. Photographic images easily can seem to be what painters striving for realism have always been after. 2. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1, p. 12; all further references to this work, abbreviated “OPI,” will be included in the text. See also Rudolf Arnheim, “Melancholy Unshaped,” Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays, p. 186. Kendall L. Walton is professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He is currently completing a book on representation in the arts. (shrink)

On the Nature of Photographic Realism’ Kendall Walton argues that lack of mental-state involvement in the formation of photographic images is a quality that sets them apart from handmade images such as paintings or sketches. This paper defends and substantially develops this idea. It argues that viewers' knowledge of this objective character of the photographic process provides them with special warrant for the acceptance of first-order perceptual beliefs formed as a result of viewing photographic images. As well, it distinguishes between (...) two different ways in which mental states can be involved in the formation of photographic images, and uses this distinction to ward off the objection that decisions about film type, composition, moment of exposure, etc. undermine the objectivity of the photographic process. (shrink)

Mainstream metaphysics has been preoccupied by inquiring into the nature of major kinds of entities, like objects, properties and events, while avoiding minor entities, like shadows or holes. However, one might want to hope that dealing with such minor entities could be profitable for even solving puzzles about major entities. I propose a new ontological puzzle, the Shadow of Constitution Puzzle, incorporating the old puzzle of material constitution, with shadows in the role of the minor entity to guide our approach (...) to the issues involved. I then analyze the standard answers to the original puzzle of constitution, in their role as potential solutions to the new puzzle. Finally, I discuss three views that can solve the proposed puzzle. (shrink)

Robert Hopkins’s Picture, Image and Experience aims to provide an account of pictorial representation that vindicates the intuitions of the many, namely that pictorial representation is a deeply visual phenomenon, that an explanation of pictorial representation needs to be based on an explanation of our experience of pictures, and that there must be some sense in the idea that pictures resemble their objects. Hopkins proposes that we can show what is correct in these intuitions by explaining pictures as representations that (...) depend on a distinctive sort of perceptual experience: experienced resemblance in outline shape between a picture and its object. Experienced resemblance in outline shape is the experience of sameness of the solid angle subtended by the contours on the pictorial surface and the solid angle subtended by the actual depicted objects. Pictures don’t resemble their objects but they are experienced as such and it is sameness of outline shape or sameness of subtended solid angles that secures this experience. (shrink)

Berkeley thinks that we only see the size, shape, location, and orientation of objects in virtue of the correlation between sight and touch. Shadows have all of these spatial properties and yet are intangible. In Seeing Dark Things (2008), Roy Sorensen argues that shadows provide a counterexample to Berkeley's theory of vision and, consequently, to his idealism. This paper shows that Berkeley can accept both that shadows are intangible and that they have spatial properties.