Jiachen Liu

Crane believes it is a mistake to aim for a general and reductive explanation of intentionality; intentionality is simply an essential and intrinsic feature of mental states like thoughts. I argue, first, that this is compatible with reductionism—indeed, it is the physicalist who can best do justice to the idea that intentional mental states have their intentionality intrinsically and essentially. Second, I argue that the real reason intentionality seems so mysterious is because we want it to play two incompatible roles: to be an essential and intrinsic feature of mental states, and to be the means by which our minds are connected to the world. I suggest that we should abandon the widely held assumption that there is only one kind of ‘aboutness’, an assumption which appears in the literature in the form of a conflation between intentionality and representation. Instead, we should recognise two kinds of aboutness: intentional aboutness, which is an intrinsic and essential feature of mental states, and representational aboutness, which is the means by which our minds are connected to the world.

I argue that if we read E. H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion with the charity that it deserves, we will find a much subtler theory of depiction than the illusion theory that is usually attributed to Gombrich. Instead of suggesting that pictures are illusory because they cause us to have experiences as of seeing the depicted objects face to face, I argue that Art and Illusion is better read as making the point that naturalistic pictures are illusory because they cause us to see qualities and properties that the pictures themselves do not possess. Once we appreciate this point, we will be in a better position to appraise the value and limits of naturalistic art.

In this essay, I defend a Wollheimian account of a twofold picture perception. While I agree with Wollheim’s objectors that a picture involves three layers that qualify a picture in its complexity – its vehicle, what is seen in it, and its subject –, I argue that the third layer does not involve perception, even indirectly: what is seen in a picture constrains its subject to be a subject of a certain kind, yet it does not force the latter to be pictorially perceived, not even indirectly. So, even if a picture is three-layered, pictorial experience remains a twofold experience, as Wollheim claimed. Neither the proponents of threefoldness nor Wollheim himself, however, have convincingly explained how the experience really is a perceptual experience. My Wollheimian account thus aims to reconceive the pictorial experience in properly perceptual terms.

This article focuses on a potentially perplexing aspect of our interactions with pictorial representations : in some cases, it seems that visual representations can play tricks on our cognitive faculties. We may either come to believe that objects represented in pictures are real or perhaps perceive them as such. The possibility of widespread pictorial illusions has been oft discussed, and discarded, in the aesthetics literature. I support this stance. However, the nature of the illusion is more complicated than is usually considered. I argue that there are five different types of potential illusions and present reasons for rejecting each. I also explore in detail the most persistent illusion: the “object recognition perceptual illusion thesis,” which states that we undergo a perceptual illusion while viewing pictorial representations simply in virtue of seeing objects in the representation. I contend that a rejection of this thesis depends on the nature of perceptual content, an issue with far-reaching consequences in aesthetics.