Now, however, one may begin to wonder whether there is any real
explanatory advance over Wollheim’s account. Do we really learn much
about what is going on in our recognitions of S in M by being told that S is
the object of a nonveridical recognition that is composed of an uncon-
scious recognition that has been brought into experience? Why not just
say, with Wollheim, that we are aware of ourselves as seeing S (the
depicted subject matter, which isn’t really there)andseeing M (the marked
surface)? Talk of an unconscious“recognition”that underlies this aware-
ness seems an unnecessary shuffle.^55 As Wollheim himself puts it,“I
doubt that anything significant can be said about exactly what a surface
must be like for it to have this effect”of triggering seeing-in.^56 In order to
say something significant, we should have to be able to characterize the
marked surface as the causally effective source of visual stimulations
making themselves felt nonconceptually, independently of any awareness
of depicted subject matter. Since at least for those who have learned a
language there is no ready way to identify the object of their attention in
pure, nonconceptual, sense-data terms, it seems hopeless to separate out
nonconceptual content from the contents of intentional and conceptual
awareness in order then to explain how they are related.^57 Like words,
pictures seem to play a nondecomposable role in how we actively attend to
the world as concept-mongering and linguistic animals, a role that
becomes available to us in and through our learning of language and other
(^55) Wollheim himself holds that we must when viewing a representational painting be
consciously and explicitly aware of both the marked surface and the depicted content
in the moment of viewing, so that for himtrompe l’oeilpaintings do not count as
representational (Painting as nn Art, p. 62). Wollheim, however, need not have held this,
and it would make more sense to take into account the temporality of looking at a
painting, within which awareness of the fact that one is looking at a marked surface is
normally available, including fortrompe l’oeil, even if not occurrent at every instant of
visual experience.
(^56) Wollheim,Painting as an Art, p. 46.
(^57) Sonia Sedivy, in reviewing Robert Hopkins’s work, criticizes all varieties of what she calls
“a factorizing approach to pictures”that would separate out distinct nonconceptual and
conceptual contributions to perceptual experience in general (review ofPicture, Image and
Experience,Philosophical Review110, 3 [July 2001], pp. 472–75), and Daniel Herwitz puts
forward a similar criticism in reviewing Dominic Lopes’s work (review ofUnderstanding
Pictures,Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism57, 3 [summer 1999], pp. 385–88). These
criticisms stem from a generally anti-empiricist line about perception that is prominent
in Wittgenstein and Davidson.
Representation, imitation, and resemblance 43