Image Interpretation: Bridging the Gap from Mechanically Produced Image to Representation

Abstract

There is currently a gap in our understanding of how figures produced by mechanical imaging techniques play evidential roles: several studies based on close examination of scientific practice show that imaging techniques do not yield data whose significance can simply be read off the image. If image-making technology is not a simple matter of nature re-presenting itself to us in a legible way, just how do the images produced provide support for scientific claims? In this article I will first show that there is a distinct question about the semiotics of mechanically produced images that has not yet been answered. I show that my account of visual representations can do so, and I argue that the role of convention involved in my account is compatible with the view that visual representations produced through mechanized imaging techniques can play genuine evidential roles in scientific reasoning.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the generous input on an early version of this project from two anonymous referees of this journal and James McAllister, and for Zachary Irving's comments on a more recent version.

Notes

Pasveer (2006) stresses throughout the piece that reference is keyed to anatomical knowledge—which is in a sense a rendering of the body, rather than the natural object.

This also concerns a different kind of image from the topic at hand; MPIs are physical objects (either printed images or physical states of a screen). For Hacking, the issue of the representational content of MPIs is more fundamental than the question of whether we could see with one. His position is that we see with an image when it is a good map, and a good map ‘should represent some structure in the specimen in essentially the same two- or three-dimensional set of relationships as are actually present in the specimen’ (Hacking 1983, 208). Thus for Hacking, questions about whether we see with an MPI depend on an account of MPIs as representations—not merely as visible objects, but as representations.

Pauwels refers to this as ‘commitments’, but I avoid that term here, because it is used to capture a different concept in the literature on depiction.

This is different from Hanson's (1961) take on interpretation, which pertained to issues that concerned visual experience generally rather than comprehending visual representations as such.

There are exceptions; Schier's discussion of conventionality is clearly connected to the philosophical literature on the conventionality of language (Schier 1986).

This view was widely criticized, and Goodman's later work (with Elgin) includes a less arbitrary role for pictorial form (some visible properties of the picture exemplify the properties ascribed to the referent).

Semczyszyn (2010) shows that the development of MRI was channelled to produce images that would be easily related to practitioners' visual knowledge of human anatomy.