Kendall Walton says that photographs are “transparent” . By this he means that “we see the world through them” . That is,With the assistance of the camera, we can see not only around corners and what is distant or small; we can also see into the past. We see long deceased ancestors when we look at dusty snapshots of them…. We see, quite literally, our dead relatives themselves when we look at photographs of them. [Pp. 251, 252]Walton is explicit on (...) one point: he does not mean merely that we have the impression of seeing ancestors, or that photographs supplement vision, or that they are duplicates or reproductions or substitutes or surrogates. Rather, “the viewer of a photograph sees, literally, the scene that was photographed” . In what follows I will urge that Walton’s argument for this view is insufficient.Walton is led to his conclusion by an account of the nature of seeing. He claims that “part of what it is to see something is to have visual experiences which are cause by it in a purely mechanical manner” . The mechanical connection is important here. For “to perceive things is to be in contact with them in a certain way. A mechanical connection with something, like that of photography, counts as contact” . Paintings and other “handmade” representations fail to have the required mechanical connection; they are humanly mediated rather than mechanically produced. Consequently, Walton thinks, paintings are not transparent. On the other hand, “objects cause their photographs and the visual experiences of viewers mechanically.” And “so we see the objects through the photographs” . Edwin Martin is associate professor of philosophy at Indiana University. He is currently completing a photographic portrait of American tent circus life. (shrink)

As computer technology develops, elements in photographs can more easily be rearranged with undetectable changes, offering broad opportunities to alter the reality depicted in photos. This article looks at some contexts in which photographs have been altered and explores moral complications in determining standards for manipulation that center on a concept of deception and credibility.

The fregean theory of meaning says how the meaningful parts of a meaningful expression contribute to that expression's sense and reference. But frege overlooks the fact that logical expressions play dual roles. The contributions of sentential connectives, For example, Are well described for contexts in which they connect sentences, But not for larger quantificational contexts. An obvious modification of the theory which might fill the abyss is considered, And it is maintained that it produces two difficulties: a replication of frege's (...) concept 'horse' troubles and an infinite proliferation of logical vocabulary. The seriousness of these difficulties is briefly discussed. (shrink)

The context and caption of a photograph often suggest that the content described is real. When this happens an assertion is made?at least implicitly. Newspapers provide such a context, and viewers naturally understand news photographs assertively. If in such a context, the content described is not real, then the viewer is likely to be deceived. Willful viewer deception is practiced by photographers in a variety of common situations in which it is unjustifiable.

A main thrust of much of Quine's work is that meaning, belief, desire, motive and other so-called “intentional phenomena” are under-determined by all possible evidence: the totality of possible evidence could not determine whether two persons meant, believed, desired, or had as motives the same thing. One way to identify a person's beliefs, desires and motives is to frame a theory of his meanings, for then we could ask him what he believed and desired; this will be a theory of (...) translation for his language. But such a theory of meaning, according to Quine, is also not uniquely determined by all the evidence. ThusTo accept intentional usage at face value is … to postulate translation relations as somehow objectively valid though indeterminate in principle relative to the totality of speech dispositions… Such postulation promises little gain in scientific insight …. (shrink)

The author takes empiricism to be "accused of privileging the visual over the discursive, the literal over the rhetorical, the static over the temporal, and totalizing explanations over dialectical processes." It is, he says, his "goal to unsettle these binary oppositions and to argue that at the heart of empiricism lies a sophisticated, dynamic, and dialectical account of the relationship between language and visual perceptions that [is] fruitful for literary study".

The author takes empiricism to be "accused of privileging the visual over the discursive, the literal over the rhetorical, the static over the temporal, and totalizing explanations over dialectical processes." It is, he says, his "goal to unsettle these binary oppositions and to argue that at the heart of empiricism lies a sophisticated, dynamic, and dialectical account of the relationship between language and visual perceptions that [is] fruitful for literary study".