Abstract

Two simple questions are addressed: What is a pictorial representation? And, how do we know what a picture is a picture of? These seemingly trivial questions have, of late, been denied their obvious and sensible answers: A pictorial representation is a painting, photograph, drawing, mosaic, etc. which looks like whatever it is a picture of; and we know what a picture is a picture of by simply seeing what it looks like. Nelson Goodman, in Languages of Art, has argued that resemblance is at best a useless notion for understanding pictorial representation and says that resemblances are irrelevant to the relation between a picture and what it is a picture of. I argue that this is false. I examine and criticize Goodman's symbol theory of pictorial representation and defend a sophisticated resemblance theory against his criticisms