Pictures and Singular Thought

Abstract

How do we acquire thoughts and beliefs about particulars by looking at pictures? One kind of reply essentially compares depiction to percep tion, holding that picture perception is a form of remote object perception. Dominic Lopes's the ory that pictures refer by demonstrative identifi cation and Kendall Walton's transparency theory for photographs constitute such remote acquain tance theories of depiction.1 The main purpose of this article is to defend an alternative concep tion of pictures on which they are not suitable for acquainting us with particulars but for ac quainting us with certain kinds of properties. This conception is outlined in Section IV, where I ar gue that pictures are useful devices for what Jane Heal has called indexical predication. In Section II and Section III, I explain why I believe that remote acquaintance theories are false and why picture perception cannot function as a form of extended or remote object perception. The main reason is that the contents of picture perceptions do not themselves provide the kind of numerical and contextual information required for singular thought. Picture reference is instead secured by independent beliefs or linguistic communication about the causal history of pictures as objects. In other words, it is beliefs about the numerical iden tity of pictures as objects that anchor the reference of the representational contents of pictures.