What are the consequences of our taking the world as a picture, of viewing it as though it were a picture, of picturing the world? This question, which is arguably at the heart of the problem of representation, is complicated by the depth at which the picture-concept – the idea of the world as a representable totality of facts – is embedded in our ways of speaking and writing. In everyday language we find ‘points of view’ and ‘perspectives’ (not to mention Weltbilder and Weltanschauungen); we say ‘that's not how I see it’, ‘I see what you mean’, or ‘I get the picture’ (presumably operating under a version of the idea that communication, at least in its deliberative modes, is a way of sharing these objects, of opening our own views of the world to the views of others). Similarly in philosophical language we often refer to the positions of various writers as ‘pictures’, and of philosophical debate in terms of arguments over differing ‘views’ of whatever matter is at hand. In other words, this metaphorical register – the language of pictures, views, frames, perspectives and so on – is highly intuitive for us, and even appears as a natural way of presenting and comparing claims and arguments.