resemblance and convention theories of depiction each seek to accommo-
date. (i) We frequently understand which objectoa given workwvisually
represents effortlessly, without explicit instruction; (ii) Whenwvisually
representso, then we have visual experience that is“as of”o; yet (iii) there
are wide varieties of styles of representation of roughly the same subject
matter in different cultures (“Consider, for example, how a Cubist, a Haida
printmaker, and a Byzantine icon painter would portray a face”^16 ). Is it then
necessary for a successful visual representation to look like what it depicts?
Or is whatcountsas looking like and as the achievement of depiction settled
by historically and locally variable conventional codes in use?
In Book X of theRepublic, Plato seems to favor the first answer, as Socrates
and Glaucon agree that a depictive painting must “imitate that which
appears as it appears.”^17 This passage at least strongly suggests that a suc-
cessful depiction musthavethe appearance of the objectothat it depicts; it
must itself look the wayolooks from a certain angle. Alan Goldman usefully
spells out this kind of resemblance theory as follows:“A painting represents
a certain object if and only if its artist [successfully] intends by marking the
canvas with paint to create visual experience in viewers that resembles the
visual experience they would have of the object.”^18
Despite the naturalness of this suggestion and its immediate appeal in
capturing intuitions (i) and (ii), it seems to be open to immediate objections.
Nelson Goodman has detailed the most important of these objections in
chapter 1 ofThe Languages of Art. Resemblance is obviously not sufficient
for representation. Identical twins resemble one another to a high degree,
but neither depicts the other.^19 “Nor,”Goodman claims,“is resemblance
necessary”for depiction.^20 Crucially, there are many things any given object
is–for example,“the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms, a complex
of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool, and much more”^21 – and any object has
many aspects. Even the idea that we are correctly toreproducejust one of an(^16) Dominic M. McIver Lopes,“Representation: Depiction,”inEncyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed.
Michael Kelly (Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. IV, pp. 139B–143B at p. 139B.
(^17) Plato,Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1992), book X, 598b, p. 268.
(^18) Alan Goldman,“Representation: Conceptual and Historical Overview,”inEncyclopedia of
Aesthetics, ed. Kelly, vol. IV, pp. 137A–139B at p. 137A.
(^19) Nelson Goodman,The Languages of Art, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976), p. 4.
(^20) Ibid., p. 5. (^21) Ibid., p. 6.
32 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art