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Depiction

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-M017-2
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2011
DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-M017-2
Version: v2,  Published online: 2011
Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/depiction/v-2

5. More ambitious accounts of seeing-in

There is one very obvious way to say more about the relation between the fold of seeing-in that presents us with the depicted object and the experience of seeing that object face to face: we could simply model the former on the latter. The simplest way to do this would be to claim that the two share a phenomenology. When I see (say) a goat in a picture, some aspect of my experience matches what it is like to see a goat in the flesh. Of course, the experience of seeing-in as a whole doesn’t match that of seeing a goat, for the former also involves (as the latter does not) a second aspect, that of seeing some marks as before me. But that is the only difference between the two experiences, at least in terms of their phenomenology. It is only the other aspect of the experience that tells me that I am not looking at a goat, but at a picture of one.

Let us call the idea that some element in seeing-in matches the phenomenology of seeing things in the flesh, partial illusion. It is an idea that refuses to die. It dates at least back to Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1st edn 1960), and still finds advocates in the twenty-first century (see Lopes 2006). Its proponents differ over many things. Some say that the element matching seeing in the flesh alternates with the element that reveals a marked surface to be before us, others that the two occur simultaneously. Some say the two elements amount to distinct experiences, others follow Wollheim in treating them merely as ‘aspects’ of a single experience. (Of course Wollheim himself rejected partial illusion, but that does not debar those who accept it from borrowing other features of his view.) Some agree with Wollheim that seeing-in requires the presence of both elements, others that while it can involve both, it need not. In particular, these last say, seeing-in occurs even if only the object-presenting element is present. Precisely that, they claim, is what goes on when we are fooled by a trompe l’oeil, when we mistake a picture of something for the thing itself.

Despite the enduring popularity of partial illusion, and regardless of its proponents’ views on these other matters, it faces a serious challenge. Let us set aside trompe l’oeil and concentrate on cases in which we are aware both of marks and of something seen in them - a goat, for example. As noted above, the experience we then have is an integrated whole. There is complexity here, but it is in the object of the experience, not the experience itself. In this respect, being aware of both the marks and the goat is radically unlike genuinely compound experiences, such as watching TV while listening to music, or seeing a castle while visualizing the cosmos. These are clearly divided into elements that do not form an integrated whole. Our experience of the goat picture, in contrast, is seamless: it is not a mere conjunction of some goat-presenting element and an element that presents us with marks. That is why, while it is easy to isolate the elements in the divided experiences just described, we can do no such thing for seeing-in. I can, for instance, cease looking at the castle while continuing to visualize the cosmos, or vice versa. When I do, some aspect of my earlier complex state continues unchanged. In contrast, no future experience is continuous with part of seeing-in. If I cease to see the goat, all I see now is plain old marks. In one sense, they look the same, but my experience of them is not continuous with that I had before, since I no longer see them as organized in that special way, organized so as to show me a goat. And if I cease to see the marks, my later experience, while it might be one of hallucinating a goat, or of visualizing one, is hardly a continuation of my earlier experience, not even in part. For in that earlier experience I precisely found the goat in the marks before me: marks that I have now ceased to see.

The challenge to the idea of partial illusion is to make sense of the fact that seeing-in forms an integrated whole in this way. For if an element in the total experience is exactly alike, in terms of phenomenology, with seeing a goat in the flesh, how can the whole be integrated? To be so, it would have to combine an element that is just like seeing a goat with an element that is a way of seeing some marks. Combining two such elements into a seamless whole looks as impossible as forming an integrated whole out of seeing one thing with listening to another. So we must reject partial illusion, however perennial its appeal.

It may have been precisely an awareness of these difficulties that drove Wollheim to refuse to say in what way one fold of seeing-in is analogous to seeing a goat in the flesh. Unfortunately, that refusal bears a high price, as we saw above: we must surrender our ability to explain central features of depiction. Is there a way both to offer those explanations while staying true to the phenomenology of our experience of pictures? Later (§7 below) I will sketch what I take to be the most promising way to meet both these goals.

For the moment, let us note that some of the difficulties just encountered also threaten quite different accounts of seeing-in. Kendall Walton, for instance, makes skilful use of an appealing idea: that seeing-in involves the visual imagination (Walton 1990). In essence, his claim is that when I see a horse in a picture, I imagine of my visual perception of the picture’s surface that it is a visual perception of a horse. The fundamental difficulty with any such view is that it is ambiguous, and that on either reading it is equally problematic. The ambiguity turns on whether or not the imagining in question involves visualizing.

Suppose first that it does. Visualizing has its own distinctive phenomenology: there is something it is like to visualize an item. For this reason, it is plausible to claim that any experience with which it is involved will have a distinctive character shaped (in part) by that phenomenology. For the same reason, however, it is hard to see how that experience can form an integrated whole. As we noted, if I visualize the cosmos while looking at a castle, my experience is split into two parts, each with its own phenomenology. How could those come together to form a coherent whole? The same problem afflicts Walton’s proposal, as currently construed. Of course if what I am looking at is a picture of what I seek to imagine, the prospects for integration are better: at least the object I am seeing is suited to sustaining that imagining. But the fundamental problem remains. There are two experiences here, one of seeing and one of visualizing. Each has its own phenomenology. How can they combine to form an integrated whole without one or the other being transformed beyond recognition? And if either is so transformed, how is it helpful to describe it by reference to its untransformed state: as visualizing a goat or seeing some marks? On this reading, then, Walton’s view falls to much the same problem as partial illusion, for all that he eschews any appeal to that idea.

Let us try the other reading. Walton’s claims are about some other kind of imagining than visualizing: perhaps the sort of imagining I go in for when I imagine that something is the case. This sort of imagining lacks any distinctive phenomenology of its own. It is therefore easy to integrate into a unified experience. On the other hand, by the same token it is ill-suited to contributing to an overall experience that has a distinctive character. In general, if I imagine that such and such while looking at a thing, my visual experience remains unchanged and the appearance of that object does not alter. Certainly there is no shift like the one that occurs when looking uncomprehendingly at a picture and suddenly coming to see things in it. Since seeing-in is both phenomenologically distinctive and an integrated whole, and since either reading of Walton leaves his view failing to capture one feature or the other, it would seem that the prospects for characterizing seeing-in using the imagination are not good (see Imagination).

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Citing this article:
Hopkins, Robert. More ambitious accounts of seeing-in. Depiction, 2011, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-M017-2. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/depiction/v-2/sections/more-ambitious-accounts-of-seeing-in.
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