Peacocke on depiction and the visual field

Abstract

Christopher Peacocke seeks to account for the nature of depiction in terms of a distinctive kind of visual experience that pictures are successfully intended to produce, viz. experienced shape similarity in the visual field. I argue in this paper that given Peacocke’s understanding of the visual field, there is no such experience. Furthermore, Peacocke’s notion of the visual field is compromised by the fact that it is unclear what it is for a concrete object to be ‘presented’ in the visual field so understood. I also argue, on independent grounds, that the conditions spelled out in Peacocke’s account are insufficient for depiction. The upshot is that anyone wishing to defend the ‘experienced-resemblance’ approach to depiction should look elsewhere for support.