bison or vase of flowers there, but in fact only a marked surface, so that our
seeing of a bison or a vase of flowers is nonveridical. According to Walton, we
should then construe that nonveridical seeing in as a form of structured
imagining. We are aware of ourselves as using the cloud or cave wall or
marked surfaces as a prop forourpretending and so we are returned to the
theory of representation as make-believe.^41
Walton’s line of argument seems, however, significantly to miss the
extent to which responsiveness to pictorial representations is immediate
and natural. Just how much pretending or making-believe is going on when
we take a marked surface to be a picture of a cat? As Wollheim emphasizes,
we seem literally toseethe represented subject matter, the cat,inthe marked
surface. Moreover, recent work in both anthropology and cognitive psych-
ology suggests that“pictorial innocents”–either young infants or members
of isolated tribes who have no indigenous system of pictorial representation–
are more adept at immediately recognizing subject matters in pictures than
can be allowed in game-playing or make-believe accounts, which require
some learning of the game or explicit routines of making believe.^42 In
addition, as both Wollheim and Flint Schier have noted, human beings in
making and responding to pictures display“natural generativity”in identi-
fying their subject matters. That is, once one has recognized a few pictures of,
for example a cat or a dog, one then has no trouble immediately recognizing
further pictures, without explicit instruction, as pictures of a tiger or a
horse.^43 This is quite unlike the kind of instruction one needs in order to
learn that unfamiliar words or words in a foreign language (“Katze,”“Pferd,”
“cheval”) mean and pick out what in fact they mean and pick out.Contemporary theories of depiction
Recent work on pictorial representation has attempted to build on and go
beyond Wollheim by explaining exactly how immediate and natural seeing-
in takes place. (In addition to characterizing the process of seeing a subject(^41) Walton,Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 301.
(^42) Michael Newell usefully surveys this recent work inWhat is a Picture? Depiction, Realism,
Abstraction(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 11–14.
(^43) Wollheim, Painting as an Art, p. 77; Flint Schier,Deeper into Pictures(Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1986), pp. 43–55.
38 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art