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Picture, Image and Experience

A Philosophical Inquiry

Robert Hopkins author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:30th Apr '09

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Picture, Image and Experience cover

This book proposes and defends an answer to the philosophical question of how pictures represent.

How do pictures represent? Do they, like words, depend on human conventions for their meaning, or do they instead exploit something else - perhaps by looking like what they represent? Robert Hopkins examines and criticizes the currently available answers to this question, before proposing and defending one of his own.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.

"...his discussion is instructive and valuable because of its detail, its elaboration of the many problems that pictures pose, and the theoretical honesty and thoroughness with which he addresses all these problems...one cannot but come away with an enriched appreciation of the problems posed by pictures and the challenges any theory needs to address." Sonea Sedivy, The Philosophical Review
"...well-structured and written, and expertly argued." International Studies in Philosophy
"...it is a significant account for the specialist interested in late 20th-century questions about aesthetic experience." International Philosophical Quarterly

ISBN: 9780521109826

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 12mm

Weight: 300g

216 pages