Depiction, Pictorial Experience, and Vision Science

Pictures are patterned, 2D surfaces designed to elicit 3Dscenerepresenting experiences from their viewers. In this essay, I argue that philosophers have tended to underestimate the relevance of research in vision science to understanding the nature of pictorial experience. Both the deeply entrenched methodology of virtual psychophysics as well as empirical studies of pictorial space perception provide compelling support for the view that pictorial experience and seeing facetoface are experiences of the same psychological, explanatory kind. I also show that an empirically informed account of pictorial experience provides resources to develop a novel, resemblancebased account of depiction. According to what I call the deep resemblance theory, pictures work by presenting virtual models of objects and scenes in phenomenally 3D, pictorial space. Most people think they know what a picture is. Anything so familiar must be simple. They are wrong. — Gibson 1980, xvii A picture is a patterned, 2D surface that, when present to sight, displays the appearance of an absent, threedimensionally organized scene. Consider the experience elicited by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Hunters in the Snow (fig. 1). The objects that we experience in the painting— on the far side of the pictorial surface,