Introduction

Abstract

Although philosophers as diverse as Plato, Descartes and Peirce have remarked on it, depiction has only become the topic of sustained philosophical attention in its own right in the past few decades.¹ This interest developed following the publication of art historian E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion in 1960.² Gombrich’s ideas stimulated philosophers, notably Richard Wollheim and Nelson Goodman, who responded with distinctive views of their own.³ Since then there has been a stream of papers on the topic, and there is a growing collection of philosophical monographs that take depiction as their subject. The relatively brief period over which this scholarship has developed and the substantial attention the topic is now receiving might inspire an optimistic thought: that the problems of depiction — of what a picture is and how depiction works — are ones that could be solved to (relatively speaking) general satisfaction in the not so distant future. In fact I do not think this is an unlikely prospect. There is nothing like a consensus yet — indeed there are many competing positions — but I believe developments in this direction have occurred. A new attempt to solve these problems, as I intend to present, will need to take these developments into account. Before identifying these advances, and sketching my own approach, it will help to define my objects of interest — pictures and depiction — and outline the major kinds of theory that have been developed to explain them.