LanCog Workshop on Fiction and Imagination
Paloma Atencia Linares (UCL, London)
Depiction, imagination and perception.
Reconsidering Walton’s view.
Walton has controversially claimed (a) that all pictures (including photographs) are fiction because, in seeing a picture one imagines that one is seeing the depicted content in the flesh; and (b) that in seeing a photograph one literally – although indirectly – sees the photographed object. Philosophers have found these claims implausible for various reasons: (1) it is not the case that all pictures are fiction; (2) explaining depiction does not require an imaginative engagement and (3) seeing objects in photographs is not tantamount to seeing the object. I agree with Walton’s critics in all of these claims. However, I will try to give some plausibility to Walton’s view. First, I’ll claim that (1) is a misunderstanding. Second, I’ll try to clarify (but not defend) Walton’s view of depiction by contrasting pictorial experience with perceptual experience more generally. Finally, I will focus on the case of photographs and I will claim that although Walton is not right in claiming that seeing objects in photographs is a case of literally perceiving the objects, photographs share an important feature with perceptual experience: the content of photographs, like the content of pictorial experience, is particular in character, and that explains their peculiar phenomenology.