| Phi 220 Spring 2016 |
|
(Site navigation is not working.) |
For Fri.: §§1-4, pp. 246-262.
For Mon.: §§5-9, pp. 262-273.
Walton begins with the idea that photography is more realistic than painting. Notice that the sense of “realism” in which he accepts this is different from the sense people usually have in mind when they describe one sort of painting as more realistic than another. Walton associates this special sense with the idea that photographs are “transparent,” that we see the world through them. Most of the paper is devoted to explaining this idea and much of our discussion will be devoted to coming to an understanding of what he means.
Part of understanding this is seeing how he takes paintings to be different from photographs. Although Walton quotes well-known people pointing to their difference (e.g., André Bazin, 1918-1958, a film theorist, and Erwin Panofsky, 1892-1968, an art historian), discussions of photography as an art more often point to the similarity between the two, so you will often find Walton defending his view against claims that photography is not essentially different from drawing and painting.
• The sections we will discuss on Fri. sketch Walton’s view and then (in §4) provide initial responses to a series of objections. His view of photography is one aspect of a general approach to representation as a sort of make-believe. This way of presenting his ideas comes out most clearly in his discussion of “ficitional seeing” in §3. We will see a little more of his general approach in the second paper we will read, but you can also find a summary of his book on the subject in his “Précis of Mimesis as Make-Believe,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 51 (1991), pp. 379-382 (on JSTOR at 2108134).
• The sections we will discuss on Mon. are mainly devoted to filling out his idea of transparency by speaking of different sorts of “counterfactual dependence” (in §5), by connecting it with a distinction between “natural” and “nonnatural” meaning (in §6), by distinguishing respects in which representations can be transparent or opaque (in §7), and by discussing sufficient conditions for transparency through a comparison with mechanically generated verbal descriptions (in §8). This range of ways of thinking about representation is valuable whether or not Walton is right about the nature of photographic representation.