Belief, experience and the act of picture-making

Abstract

Which mental states are involved in representing the world via pictures? According to the Belief-Involving View, belief is necessary. According to the Mere Experience View, belief is dispensable; one can depict objects for which one does not possess concepts, so the mere experience of an object is sufficient. I examine Dominic Lopes' defence of, and Berys Gaut's objections to, the Mere Experience View. I argue Gaut's objections are unsuccessful since they (i) require the defender of the Mere Experience View to endorse a theory of action that is optional, at best; (ii) undermine Gaut's own positive claims and (iii) are question-begging. I argue that the real problem with the Mere Experience View is that it is too permissive in circumscribing situations in which one can depict objects. I further argue, contra Lopes, that the fact that one can depict objects for which one does not possess concepts supplies no argument for or against either view.

Keywords:

• action
• belief
• depiction
• non-epistemic seeing
• pictorial representation

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Maria Alvarez, Helen Bradley, Robert Hopkins and Keith Hossack for comments on the earlier versions. This research was made possible by a British Society of Aesthetics PhD Studentship Award and a Royal Institute of Philosophy Jacobsen Fellowship.

Notes on contributor

Dan Cavedon-Taylor is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. His main research interests are in aesthetics and the philosophy of art; social epistemology; and the philosophies of mind and perception.

Notes

1. This is not to say that photographers' beliefs play no causal role in bringing about, or ‘triggering’ photographs, just as the belief-independence of perceptual states does not entail beliefs play no causal role in bringing about perceptual states. The photographer may have decided to take a picture of their niece, say, just as the perceiver may have decided to look at the Müller-Lyer Illusion. The point is that what actually gets represented, in both cases, is then independent of belief.

2. ‘Transparency’ is thus a term of art in this context. Walton does not take photographs to be transparent in the everyday sense.

3. For ease, I shall assume that perceptual experience has representational content. My comments can be interpreted in terms friendlier to the naive realist by parsing talk of properties ‘represented in’ experience as talk of properties that are ‘present in’ or ‘constituents of’ a perceptual experience.

4. A small sample of non-causal accounts includes those found in Anscombe (1957), Tanney (1995) and Alvarez (2007).

5. This would seem to require holding a non-cognitive theory of emotion.

6. The claim that seeing an object need not involve belief, and is hence a non-epistemic or non-doxastic state is most notably defended in Dretske (1969). See also Cassam (2007), Jackson (1977) and Warnock (1955).

7. The cup example originates from Cassam (2007, 27). Consider also the contrast between ‘The mouse sees the cat’ and ‘Joanna sees that the cat is limping’.

8. Might Archie draw the cuff link, absent noticing it qua cuff link, on the basis of noticing something silver and shiny in the draw, say? Intuitively, it seems so. But this does not threaten the Belief-Involving View. The Belief-Involving View says only that Archie must have some belief about the cuff link in order to draw it, not that he need have a belief about it qua cuff link and therefore that he needs to possess the concept CUFF LINK in order to draw the cuff link. Moreover, in noticing something silver and shiny in the drawer, Archie believes that there is something silver and shiny in the drawer. Although this belief is not a belief about the cuff link as such, it is still a belief about the cuff link's appearance.

9. To clarify, the difference between Gaut's second objection and my own is that I take Gaut's objection to be that there is no room in logical space for the Mere Experience View. Gaut seems to think that the view attributes perceptual judgements and hence beliefs to artists, since it must attribute ‘seeing that’ states to artists. My view is that there is room in logical space for the Mere Experience View. Contra Gaut, there is no incoherence in the view, since we should not take the view to attribute perceptual judgements and hence beliefs to artists; rather, we should take it to attributes object-seeing states. My critical point against the Mere Experience View is that once the point about object-seeing is granted, and it is rescued from Gaut's objection, it becomes clear that the view is unable to do the explanatory work its defenders claim it can.