Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry

This book is about how pictures represent. Do they, like words, depend on human conventions for their meaning, or do they instead exploit something else--perhaps by looking like what they represent? The problem is philosophical, but it has also interested psychologists and art historians. Robert Hopkins examines and criticizes the currently available answers to this question before proposing and defending one of his own, and concludes with an attempt to see what a proper understanding of picturing can tell us about that deeply mysterious phenomenon, the visual imagination.

"...his discussion is instructive and valuable because of its detail, its elaboration of the many problems that pictures pose, and the theoretical honesty and thoroughness with which he addresses all these problems...one cannot but come away with an enriched appreciation of the problems posed by pictures and the challenges any theory needs to address." Sonea Sedivy, The Philosophical Review

"...well-structured and written, and expertly argued." International Studies in Philosophy

"...it is a significant account for the specialist interested in late 20th-century questions about aesthetic experience." International Philosophical Quarterly