Alessandro Cavazzana

The third issue of the Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts is centered on a series of questions related to the nature of images. What properties characterize them? Do they exist also in our minds? What relationship do they have with phenomena such as perception, memory, language and interpretation? The authors participating in this issue have been asked to answer these and other questions starting from and in dialogue with the two philosophical perspectives that have most enriched the study of our object of research since the second half of the twentieth century: analytical philosophy and visual culture studies. The first four essays address problems related to ontology (Didi-Huberman, Prinz, Bantinaki, Manzotti). In their pages the question will be asked not only about the nature of images but also about what it means for an image to represent an object or an action realistically. The second part contains discussions related to the topics of perception, appreciation and creation of pictures (Ferretti; Gavaler, Goldberg; Pigoni, Coraci, Carlenzi). The third section goes through the problems related to the very concept of representing by images (Biggs; Weichert; Derby). The last section of the issue is devoted to two cases in which images are used not so much and not only to represent something, but also to convey ethical-political values (Fasnacht; Olesiejuk).

The purpose of this paper is to give a critical reading of Noël Carroll’s account of visual metaphors. In particular, I have highlighted the possible issues arising from his proposal, focusing on two aspects: 1) homospatiality is not the pictorial equivalent for the ‘is’ of identity that, according to Carroll, can be found in verbal metaphors of the kind «A is B». The ‘is’ of verbal metaphors predicates an intension of the metaphorizing term - that the interpreter is supposed to grasp through the context - and does not suggest identity between A and B; 2) it is hard to sustain that the comprehension of pictorial metaphors relies on a visual perception not mediated by codes. The article ends taking the moves from one of the final considerations advanced by Carroll – namely that a visual metaphor is a device for encouraging imaginative insights – and moves further, trying to sketch out a theory of visual metaphor leveraging the key role of mental images in cognition.