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Title
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Depiction, realism, and immersiveness an investigation into how images represent objects
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Author
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Abstract
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| In this thesis I aim at providing philosophical reflections into how images depict objects. More specifically, I seeks to address two main ideas about depictive images, namely that they amount to a distinctive way to represent objects, and that objects can be depicted in a variety of ways, to serve a variety of informational functions. Regarding the first point, following a proposal by Abell (2009) and Blumson (2014), I argue that a pictorial image depicts a particular object, or an object of some kind, if and only if it resembles such object in some visible aspect because the maker intends the picture to resemble such object in that aspect, in order to communicate something about the object. The communicative character of the maker’s intention consists in bringing the object to the spectators’ mind by enabling the spectators to recognise the underlying intention. With respect to the second point, I show that depictive images can serve different communicative functions in virtue of the kind of information, based on what they depict, that they make relevant to an audience. My analysis focuses on two instances of these functions, namely realism and immersiveness. For what concerns realism, I defend Abell’s view (2007) that the function of realistic images is to give information, on the basis of their depictive content, about how objects look like if one sees them, and that the information of this kind provided by a picture has to be relevant to some audience. I then rely on this theory of realism as a blueprint to put forward a novel hypothesis about immersive images. More specifically, I claim that immersive images provide relevant depictive information, to some audience, about how the depicted scene looks like, were it the environment one is acting within. |
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Language
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English
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Publication
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Antwerp
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University of Antwerp, Faculty of Arts, Department of Philosophy
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2021
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Volume/pages
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xviii, 213 p.
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Note
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Cools, Arthur [Supervisor]
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Myin, Erik [Supervisor]
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Full text (open access)
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