Abstract of Comments: Seeing through Pictures Fred Dretske Noûs, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1984 A. P. A. Western Division Meetings. (Mar., 1984), pp. 73-74. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624%28198403%2918%3A1%3C73%3AAOCSTP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6 Noûs is currently published by Blackwell Publishing.
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ABSTRACT OF COMMENTS Seeing Through Pictures
FREDDRETSKE UNIVERSITY O F WISCONSIN, MADISON
Ken Walton's thesis has two parts: (1) photographs possess a kind of realism beyond the reach of pictures made by traditional methods; and (2) this superior realism is best thought of as providing us with a new way of seeing-a way of seeing through the picture to the objects pictured. I agree with the first claim and disagree with the second. Walton describes a number of important differences between photographs and paintings, differences that are, I think, sufficient to establish the superior realism of the former. Pictures are always of something (paintings need not be); photographs mean something in a way (natural meaning) that paintings do not (e.g., a snapshot of you sailing means you were sailing in a way a painting of you does not); and the representational successes and failures of a photograph do not depend, as they do with drawings and paintings, on the passage of information through the (possibly distorting) cognitive "lens" of an intervening agent. These differences are epistemologically important and, taken together, they yield the first part of Walton's thesis. But these differences do not yield the conclusion that we can actually see the objects, people and situations whose photographs we see. Photographs, like other natural signs (footprints, gauge readings, cloud formations) may be informationally transparent, but they are not perceptually transparent. Seeing a photograph of Aunt Mildred is a way of getting information about Aunt Mildred, but we can get information about X , and get it visually, without ever seeing X . The same is true of all our senses. I get information about the doorbutton (that it is being depressed) through the bell, and I get this information auditorily, but this doesn't mean I hear the button being pushed. What I hear is the bell. The bell is informationally, but not perceptually, transparent. Photographs, television images, and moving pictures are not like mirrors, eyeglasses and telescopes. The latter devices are perceptually transparent (in the sense that they enable us to see other things through them). Their transparency resides in the fact that, unlike the television image or the photograph, the information about objects is not embedded in information about the medium or device
through which the object is seen. In watching a football game on television, for example, we get information about the game by getting information about what is happening on the television screen. For purposes of understanding perception, this is exactly the same as getting information about your gas tank by noting (hence, getting information about) the position of the fuel gauge pointer. You don't see the gas tank through the gauge, and you don't see the football game through the television image. In watching the game through field glasses from the upper bleachers, however, the information about the game is not embedded in information about the instrument through which the game is seen. You don't have to see what is going on in or on the lenses of the binoculars to see what is happening on the field. Hence, unlike television, moving pictures, and photographs, the glasses really do let you see the quarterback and his touchdown run.
