Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Thought as Language
- Seeing through Language
- ‘The only sure sign…’: Thought and Language in Descartes
- Words and Pictures
- Social Externalism and Conceptual Diversity
- The Explanation of Cognition
- Thought Without Language: Thought Without Awareness?
- Philosophy, Thought and Language
- The Flowering of Thought in Language
- Talking to Cats, Rats and Bats
- Analyticity, Linguistic Rules and Epistemic Evaluation
- How to Do Other Things With Words
- Bibliography: Twentieth-Century Philosophical Texts on Thought and Language
- Index
Words and Pictures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Thought as Language
- Seeing through Language
- ‘The only sure sign…’: Thought and Language in Descartes
- Words and Pictures
- Social Externalism and Conceptual Diversity
- The Explanation of Cognition
- Thought Without Language: Thought Without Awareness?
- Philosophy, Thought and Language
- The Flowering of Thought in Language
- Talking to Cats, Rats and Bats
- Analyticity, Linguistic Rules and Epistemic Evaluation
- How to Do Other Things With Words
- Bibliography: Twentieth-Century Philosophical Texts on Thought and Language
- Index
Summary
Pictures have always played a prominent role in philosophical speculation about the mind, but the concept of a picture has itself been the object of philosophical scrutiny only intermittently. As a matter of fact, it was studied most intensively in the course of a theological controversy in the Eastern Roman Empire, during the eighth century – which is a sufficient indication of its marginal place in the history of philosophy. Perhaps this is because pictures have never produced in us the theoretical paralysis which Augustine famously associated with time, but have on the contrary generally seemed too unproblematic to deserve much time from philosophers. Even today, after several decades of accumulating theory, philosophers with no stake in the matter are often impervious to its charm. I feel some sympathy for this attitude, because the task of explaining the nature of depiction is, I believe, one which calls for the refinement rather than refutation of our first thoughts about it. But a precise understanding of depiction is both a necessary prolegomenon to a significant part of aesthetics, and a useful prophylactic against confusion in the theory of the imagination. Besides, there is also the pleasure of the chase, which J. L. Austin nonchalantly appealed to many years before the Research Assessment Exercise was inaugurated.
Introduction
Although abstract paintings are sometimes called pictures, I shall follow the restrictive convention which stipulates that every picture depicts, is a picture of, something or other.
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- Information
- Thought and Language , pp. 51 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998