John Kulvicki

This chapter supports the view that sounds are stable dispositions of objects to vibrate in response to being mechanically stimulated, rather than the idea that sounds are events. Two questions animate the discussion. First, do sounds have durations? Second, do sounds seem to have durations? If sounds have durations, they are quite unlike qualities or dispositions, which might be instantiated for durations, but are themselves durationless. One piece of evidence that sounds have durations is that they seem to have durations. If so, then any account of sounds contrary to this implies an unpalatable error theory of sound perception. Understanding the force of the stable disposition view depends upon recognizing the role played by sound stimulants—the mechanical impulses that reveal things’ sounds. The defensibility of this approach raises general questions about how best to think about perception and its objects across modalities.

Some figurative practices create space. That is, the appropriate experience of such artifacts involves a scene, populated with things, that is not experienced as being spatially related to the viewers’ space. Exemplars of pictorial representation, whether drawings or paintings, prints or photos, are space creators. Not every artifact one might be tempted to call pictorial is a space creator, however, so space creation draws an interesting line between 2D figurative practices. Diorama shows that there are 3D space-creating practices too, so space creation unites some 2D and 3D work, while calling much-needed attention to practices like diorama that are not central to artmaking. Since not all 3D figurative work is space creative, the category also distinguishes 3D practices from each other. Thinking in terms of space creation thus draws new philosophically illuminating boundaries around our practices, and helps us rethink existing accounts of these phenomena.

Little has been said about whether pictures can depict properties of properties. This article argues that they do. As a result, resemblance theories of depiction must be changed to accommodate this phenomenon. In addition, diagrams and maps are standardly understood to represent properties of properties, so this article brings accounts of depiction closer to accounts of diagrams than they had been before. Finally, the article suggests that recent work on perceptual content gives us reason to believe we can perceive properties of properties.

Over the last fifteen years, communication has become pictorial in a manner that it never was before. Billions of people have smart phones that enable them to take, edit, and share pictures easily whenever they choose to do so. This has created expressive niches within which new activities, with their own norms, continue to develop. Ready availability of these pictorial modes of communication, we claim, not only constitutes a change in the range of our communicative practices, but also changes the world about which we communicate. Increasingly, we are making a world that’s worth depicting, using the tools we now possess. This paper will unpack one example of this phenomenon, trompe l’oeil street art. More and more of this seems to be produced with the intention that it is seen primarily in pictures. It makes sense that anything someone makes, and wants to be seen, would be made with decent photography potential in mind. You want photos to be able to, as they say, do justice to your work no matter what kind of visual work you make. In these cases, however, the pictures of the work are reliably more interesting than the pieces seen in the flesh.

The central claim of this paper is that what it is like to see green or any other perceptible property is just the perceptual mode of presentation of that property. Perceptual modes of presentation are important because they help resolve a tension in current work on consciousness. Philosophers are pulled by three mutually inconsistent theses: representational externalism, representationalism, and phenomenal internalism. I throw my hat in with defenders of the first two: the externalist representationalists. We are faced with the problem of explaining away intuitions that favor phenomenal internalism. Perceptual modes of presentation account for what it is like to see properties in a way that accommodates those intuitions without vindicating phenomenal internalism itself. Perceptual MoPs therefore provide a new way of being an externalist representationalist

Problems concerning scientists’ uses of representations have received quite a bit of attention recently. The focus has been on how such representations get their contents and on just what those contents are. Less attention has been paid to what makes certain kinds of scientific representations different from one another and thus well suited to this or that epistemic end. This article considers the latter question with particular focus on the distinction between images and graphs on the one hand and descriptions and related representations on the other. *Received January 2008; revised September 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755; e‐mail: [email protected].

Analog representation is often cast in terms of an engineering distinction between smooth and discrete systems. The engineering notion cuts across interesting representational categories, however, so it is poorly suited to thinking about kinds of representation. This paper suggests that analog representations support a pattern of interaction, specifically open-ended searches for content across levels of abstraction. They support the pattern by sharing a structure with what they represent. Continuous systems that satisfy the engineering notion are exemplars of this kind because they are uninterpretable unless they are structure-preserving. Analog representations, so understood, include pictures, images, diagrams, and most graphs. This conception of analogicity also fits well with a line of thought about what makes perceptual states distinctive: they satisfy a “parts principle”

There are undeniably many ways of depicting things, but it is unclear what the diversity of depictive representational systems consists in. What is a way of depicting something, and how many ways of depicting things are there? Pictorial diversity starts to seem interesting and confusing when one tries to fix a picture's content while varying its surface features, or vice versa. This chapter seeks to explain what is at issue in discussing pictorial diversity and to introduce two tools for understanding it: the notions of syntactic competition and semantic competition. The fact that pictures compete neither syntactically nor semantically places important constraints on picture interpretation.