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Abstract:

Recently, philosophers have begun to explore how pictures are structured—what their various meaningful parts might be, and how the meaning of the whole emerges from the meaning of those parts and the way they are combined. Some undertaking these investigations hope to develop a compositional semantics for pictures parallel to that on offer for language. I am sceptical. My hypothesis is that this is one point at which language and pictures diverge. The various parts of a picture mean what they do, indeed mean anything at all, only given what the other parts mean. As a result, except in rare cases, it is not possible to develop a theory capable of predicting the meaning of a whole picture from knowledge of its parts. Pictures do exhibit structure, but that structure is holistic. This has consequences for aesthetics. It explains how picture-making is permeated by the artist’s technique and style, as writing is not. And it offers a new explanation of a puzzling phenomenon: that even accomplished artists have often copied the work of others.