Colloquium: Robert Hopkins (New York University)

TITLE: Holism in pictures

ABSTRACT: Our two most familiar ways to represent the world are language and pictures. In philosophy, the study of language has dominated. While the semantics and syntax of natural and formal languages have been examined in detail, philosophical investigation of representational pictures has largely been limited to distinguishing pictures from representations of other kinds. However, change is afoot. Philosophers have begun to explore how pictures are structured—what their various meaningful parts might be, and how the meaning of the whole emerges from the meaning of those parts and the way they are combined. However, while others hope to develop a compositional semantics for pictures parallel to that proposed for language, my hypothesis is that this is one point at which language and pictures diverge. The various parts of a picture mean what they do, indeed mean anything at all, only given what the other parts mean. As a result, except in rare cases, it is not possible to develop a theory capable of predicting the meaning of a whole picture from knowledge of its parts. Pictures do exhibit structure, but that structure is holistic. And this has consequences for aesthetics. It explains how picture-making is permeated by the artist’s technique and style, as writing is not.