Elisabeth Camp is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She works in philosophy of language, mind, and aesthetics, focusing on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit the standard philosophical model of minds and languages as a propositional calculus. When she’s not COVID-home-schooling, she is working on a book about perspectives.
A post by Elisabeth Camp
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” or so the saying goes. But which words, and to what end? Consider the following ‘minimal pair’ representing Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. Here it is as told in Genesis (22:1-19, ESV):
After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac.... On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.” And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.
When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son…. And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.”
Here depicted by Caravaggio (1602):
What it’s like to engage with these two artifacts is very different: they elicit different distributions of interpretive labor and afford different epistemic and aesthetic rewards. Here, I want to focus on how three differences between imagistic and linguistic systems – in content, perspective, and force – conspire to shape the economics of imagination: in who pays, in what coin, for what result. There is no global currency of ‘worth’, but there are systematic tradeoffs to be navigated, by both maker and audience.
Content
First, representational media differ in their expressive profiles. Different media make meaning in different ways, using different parts and interpreting and combining those parts via different rules (Camp 2007, 2015, 2018). The story for language is familiar: it takes words, assigns them meaning through something like convention, and combines them using something like predication. The rules for pictures are murkier; but broadly, the basic elements are colored shapes; the meaning rule maps those colors to represented colors; and the composition rule projects the shapes onto objects in a pictorial space (Peacocke 1992, Kulvicki 2020, Greenberg forthcoming). For both language and pictures, there is heated debate about how much is encoded in the representation and how much is provided by pragmatic ‘enrichment’. But wherever we draw those lines, we should grant that the systems’ different rules affect what they can encode, and how.
Roughly, pictures work by depicting objects in a space at a time. Some theorists hold that those depicted objects are nothing more than illuminated 2D surfaces located at relative distances and directions. Intuitively, it seems that pictures also depict richer contents, including types (like old men and angels), individuals (like Abraham and Isaac), and events (like the angel staying Abraham’s hand). For our purposes, what matters is not whether these richer contents are encoded or enriched, but just that they must be anchored somehow in the ‘bare bones’ content of spatially distributed 2D surfaces, and generated through a species of imaginative amplification that involves perceptual recognition.
Pictures’ reliance on perceptual anchoring and amplification affects what they can depict. Caravaggio arguably shows Abraham’s resolve and Isaac’s terror in their faces. But he cannot show the temporal succession and causal structure of the events surrounding the sacrificial scene, or God’s acknowledgment that Isaac is Abraham’s beloved only son: these contents are too abstract to be anchored perceptually in a static scene. Further, the only way Caravaggio can represent general contents such as Abraham’s being resolute, being old, or wearing red is by instantiating those properties in some more determinate facial and bodily features. And if he wants to depict Abraham as wearing red, then he must also depict every other object as having a color.
By contrast, language’s more abstract rules enable storytellers to directly encode abstract contents – most notably, causal relations between spatio-temporally disparate events and “the small movements of the inner world” (Nussbaum 1992). The author of Genesis can remain silent about how general properties like being resolute or red are instantiated when doing so would be a distraction; and they can be highly selective in which details they specify, within and across classes of properties like color and clothes. But they can only represent particular, concrete properties like color, shape, and distance indirectly, via demonstrative reference to a real or imagined sample. And they must spell out each encoded property separately rather than bundling them into an integrated, simultaneously present whole.
Theorists of the arts, most famously Lessing in Laocoön (1766), have sometimes exploited such observations to argue that different media are distinctively suited for certain topics, or are superior to other arts. This doesn’t follow. Caravaggio’s painting may fulfill in a particularly immediate way the Council of Trent’s (1563) injunction that art should assist religious meditation by awakening the senses; that’s what his patrons paid him for. But stories like Genesis – or Jenny Diski’s (2002) Only Human: A Divine Comedy – also awaken perceptual imagination in contemplating Isaac’s sacrifice. More importantly, there are other modes of imagination, and other functions for art, besides stimulating sensory simulation. Interpretation always uses imagination to go beyond what is given, and aesthetic engagement generally involves a “total imaginative experience” (Collingwood 1938) integrating multiple modalities. There is no one or best aesthetic destination, and no one or best way to get there. The point is just that because pictures and language map out different expressive terrains, moving from what is given to all that is ultimately conveyed traverses different paths of imaginative supplementation in the two cases.
Perspective
The second difference between pictures and language I want to highlight involves the perspectives they impose on their contents. A perspective, as I understand it, is an open-ended disposition to notice, connect, and respond (Camp 2006, 2017, 2019). In the case of pictures, this is implemented literally, via projection from an egocentric viewpoint. Thus, in Caravaggio’s painting, the angel is closer to the viewer than the trees and Abraham’s torso are. The angel is also depicted sideways-on, while Abraham is depicted frontally; Abraham’s and Isaac’s faces are illuminated while the angel’s is shadowed; and Isaac’s and the angel’s skin are bright white while Abraham’s face and dress are sallow and the knife is dark and sharply outlined. By deploying these and other compositional tools in a coordinated manner, Caravaggio focuses perceptual attention within the scene and links its parts together into a dynamic, holistic Gestalt – one that in turn exemplifies a more conceptual holistic understanding of the story, emphasizing the monumental violence Abraham is enacting on Isaac.
Language employs a different, more abstract set of perspectival tools. The most obvious analogue to perceptual point of view is pronominal narrative voice; but many constructions, like indexical orientation (“stay here”, “go there”) function to express attentional focus (Roberts 2012). Connectives (“so”, “but”) and repetition (“And he said, ‘Here I am’.”) forge structural connections between disparate pieces of information (Asher and Lascarides 2003). And literal and figurative vocabulary (“sacrifice” v. “slaughter”; “the stars of heaven”) express moral, emotional, and aesthetic attitudes. Like Caravaggio, the author of Genesis weaves these perspectival features together to construct a holistic understanding of the story, but one that emphasizes Abraham’s relation to God rather than Isaac, and the costs and rewards of dutiful devotion rather than the terror of filicide.
Both picture makers and storytellers, then, must navigate a nexus of perspectival choice points: how to pose, color and illuminate each figure; what to mention when, and in which words. These choices conspire to express a perspective, in ways that then guide audiences’ imaginative engagement with the represented contents. In both cases, these perspectival effects encompass both the iconic simulation of an agent’s experience of a represented scene (Currie 2010) and also the implementation of a more abstract, open-ended interpretive style (Camp 2009, 2017). But the two media offer different perspectival tools and constraints; and a significant part of art’s reward lies in inhabiting an artist’s distinctive style of navigating these choices, independent of the particular contents they represent.
Force
The final difference resides in the force with which pictures and language present perspectivally-inflected contents. Natural languages like English encode speech act force through grammatical mood: a speaker uttering a declarative sentence characteristically commits to its truth, while the speaker of an imperative directs their hearer to do something. Pictures, by contrast, lack conventional force markers; depending on context, the same picture – say, of John the Baptist’s severed head on a plate – could contribute information, raise a question or a possibility, or issue a command. At the same time, insofar as pictures draw on our capacity for perceptual recognition, they carry the appearance of being “transparent” traces of the scenes they represent (Walton 1984, Lopes 1994): seeing the picture is to that extent like seeing the depicted scene itself, and the picture maker a mere transmitter.
These differences in conventional commitment and apparent transparency generate different dynamics of interpretive force. Both media can be used to persuade, and thereby also to deceive. Makers in both media can (seem to) “let the facts speak for themselves” in order to hint at some “off-line” content, motive, or question (Camp 2008, 2018c). And both can offer flights of escapist fantasy. But conviction, when it comes, traces different routes through the two media. Sentences compel at least partly because they stamp the speaker’s imprimatur on their contents: the author of Genesis purports to tell us what happened on the mountain, and his words afford us no access to those events unless we accept his testimonial authority. By contrast, pictures aim to speak for themselves: The Sacrifice of Isaac purports, through its own vivid presence, to show a portion of the world to us, whatever we might think of Caravaggio.
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The differences we’ve identified in content, perspective and force operate in tandem. Pictures show an abundance of concrete things in simultaneous relation, relying on imagination to extrapolate high-level contents and affective attitudes. Stories tell a curated sequence of abstract claims, relying on imagination to fill in concrete details and connections. Pictorial audiences are more likely to feel they have seen a scene with their own eyes, albeit perhaps through a rose-colored, kaleidoscopic telescope; literary audiences are more likely to feel they are temporarily inhabiting another’s mind. Both media have their opportunities and costs. The question is how to enlist imagination to get where you want to go, given the resources you have.
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Thanks to Antony Aumann, Joy Shim, and participants of the 2019 Rutgers Aesthetics Seminar.
References
Asher, Nick and Alex Lascarides (2003): Logics of Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Camp, Elisabeth (2006): “Metaphor and That Certain ‘Je Ne Sais Quoi’,” Philosophical Studies 129:1, 1-25.
——— (2007): “Thinking with Maps,” Philosophical Perspectives 21:1, Philosophy of Mind, ed. J. Hawthorne (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), 145-182.
——— (2008): “Showing, Telling, and Seeing: Metaphor and ‘Poetic’ Language,” The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic, and Communication, vol. 3: A Figure of Speech: Metaphor [Online], 1-24.
——— (2009): “Two Varieties of Literary Imagination: Metaphor, Fiction, and Thought Experiments,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Poetry and Philosophy XXXIII, ed. Howard Wettstein (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), 107-130.
——— (2015): “Logical Concepts and Associative Characterizations,” in The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts, ed. E. Margolis and S. Laurence (Cambridge MA: MIT Press), 591-621.
——— (2017): “Perspectives in Imaginative Engagement with Fiction,” Philosophical Perspectives, Philosophy of Mind, ed. J. Hawthorne (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell).
——— (2018a): “Why Cartography is Not Propositional,” in Non-Propositional Intentionality, ed. A. Grzankowski and M. Montague, Oxford University Press, 19-45.
——— (2018b): “Insinuation, Common Ground, and the Conversational Record,” in New Work in Speech Acts, ed. D. Harris, D. Fogal and M. Moss, Oxford University Press, 40-66.
——— (2019): “Perspectives and Frames in Pursuit of Ultimate Understanding,” in Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology, ed. Stephen Grimm (Oxford University Press, 2019), 17-45.
Collingwood, R. G. (1938): The Principles of Art (London: Oxford University Press).
Currie, Gregory (2010): “Narration, Imitation, and Point of View,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, eds. Hagberg & Jost, Wiley-Blackwell (2010), pp. 331-349.
Greenberg, Gabriel (forthcoming): “Semantics of Pictorial Space,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology.
Kulvicki, John (2020): Modeling the Meaning of Pictures (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1766/1962): Laocoön, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry, translated by Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill).
Lopes, Dominic (1995): “Pictorial Realism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53:3, 277-285.
Nussbaum, Martha (1992): “Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Peacocke, Christopher (1992): A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
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Walton, Kendall (1984): “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11:2, 246-277.