Frédéric Wecker

The iconic portrait has been the subject of recent attempts at definition by aestheticians. Despite their respective merits, however, I believe that the proposed definitions are not only unnecessarily sophisticated, but also have the defect of not sufficiently connecting the theory of portraiture to the theory of depiction. I will propose a functionalist definition according to which portraits are singular iconic representations that are distinguished by the principal function that their makers have assigned them: to enable their viewers to think something about the represented subjects by considering the way in which they are depicted. This definition has the virtue that recent proposals lack: by making the condition of being a singular representation a necessary condition for being a portrait, it makes explicit how the theory of portraiture is connected to the theory of depiction at its very core. In so doing, it places itself firmly within a framework initiated in the theory of depiction by Antonia Phillips and Dominic Lopes.

Certain pairs of pictures can apparently give rise to iconic equivalents of Frege's first puzzle. To solve them, it is tempting to resort to a solution inspired by Frege, distinguishing reference of pictures from their sense. This possibility has been considered by several philosophers. Recently, Steenhagen (2021) has argued that we don't need the ‘sense’ and ‘reference’ distinction in a theory of depiction and pointed the way to Russellian-inspired solutions to iconic equivalents of Frege's puzzle. I will argue that these solutions do not have the same explanatory power as the new Frege-inspired solutions I defend, since they can only partially elucidate instances of Frege's first puzzle. To fully elucidate these puzzles, it seems necessary to consider the perspectival nature of pictures, which may well be a good equivalent of sense in pictures, according to a recent proposal by Burge (2022).

This article aims at defending the old theory of iconological dualism that opposes ‘handmade’ pictures to photographic pictures. I defend a new version of that theory, according to which photographs always enable viewers to have singular thoughts on the things photographed, while handmade pictures by themselves never enable viewers to have singular thoughts but only enable them to have what I call ‘thoughts by depiction’. To this end, I defend the old theory according to which singular thoughts require a special relation—called ‘acquaintance’—between the thinker and the object thought about. I put this traditional view forward thanks to a new version of the classic spy argument for the acquaintance constraint on singular thoughts.