Resemblance and Representation: An Essay in the Philosophy of Pictures

The Gricean program in the philosophy of language employs a strategy of divide and conquer by distinguishing speaker meaning, which is analysed in terms of intention, from sentence meaning, which is analysed in terms of convention. Whereas chapters two and three extend the Gricean analysis of speaker meaning in terms of intention to encompass depiction, chapters four and five modify the Gricean analysis of sentence meaning in terms of convention by jettisoning arbitrariness in favour of resemblance to form an analysis of depictive symbol systems. By jettisoning resemblance as well, chapter five extends this analysis to symbol systems in general. Languages are striking for their compositionality: the meaning of sentences depends upon the meanings and arrangement of their parts. Chapters six and seven pursue the analogy between depiction and description to its extreme by arguing that depictive symbol systems, like languages, are compositional. Chapter six argues that both depiction and description have compositional structure and chapter seven argues that compositional structure has the same role in the interpretation of both depiction and description. The platitude that depiction is mediated by resemblance is neglected in these chapters, but the pursuit of a strong analogy between depiction and description continues.