## Things to talk to Enrico about. Doing all of kulvicki's book The teaching emails ## ![[[[[[[[Types of Representation]]]]]]]] ![[[[[[[[Representing Things as Having Properties]]]]]]]] ![[[[[[[[Content and Kind of Representation]]]]]]]] ![[[[[[[[Manners of Representation]]]]]]]] >"Here is one way to make a composite notion of realism out of these two ingredients: realism is accuracy, and the extent of realism is constituted by the number of things about which a repre- sentation is accurate. Informativeness measures realism, while accuracy captures its character." another from Kulvicki on realism >Realistic pictures of cats must depict cats, and depict them as having qua- lities we take cats to have. Specifically, they must depict them as having qualities included in our perceptual conceptions of cats. This is close to Abell’s idea that pictures are realistic to the extent that they depict objects in the way that they would look were one to see them. On my view, “judgments of realism are made with respect to those properties in one’s conception of an object that one can perceive it as having” (2006b: 346). Our conceptions of objects typically outrun the features we can perceive them to have. Conceptions of gold usually include the fact that gold is an element, for example, though that is not perceptible, like the yellowness or sheen of gold is. >Realistic pictures of cats must depict cats, and depict them as having qua- lities we take cats to have. Specifically, they must depict them as having qualities included in our perceptual conceptions of cats. This is close to Abell’s idea that pictures are realistic to the extent that they depict objects in the way that they would look were one to see them. On my view, “judgments of realism are made with respect to those properties in one’s conception of an object that one can perceive it as having” (2006b: 346). Our conceptions of objects typically outrun the features we can perceive them to have. Conceptions of gold usually include the fact that gold is an element, for example, though that is not perceptible, like the yellowness or sheen of gold is. >In fact, “it is part of our perceptual conception of most objects that we cannot see every patch of their surfaces at once” (2006b: 346; see also Abell 2007: 13 and Newall 2011: 116). Restricting the information relevant to realism in this way blocks easy counterexamples to the proposal. One could imagine a rather unrealistic picture that tells one a lot about how an object looks, but from multiple viewpoints at once. David Hockney’s photo collages are examples of this phenomenon. Such pictures do not seem terribly realistic, even though they are accurate and informa- tive. Pictures don’t just capture something about how objects look; they typically capture something about how objects look from a certain view- point. Abell suggests that this is an improvement over Hyman, who would have trouble denying that the Hockney collage is realistic because he does not similarly restrict [[the contents]] relevant to realism (Abell 2007: 10). >Another worry about relevance that applies more to Lopes than to Abell is that relevance applies to many kinds of representation, even though we rarely think of them in terms of realism. It’s ordinary to think of sculpture, picture-making, and even literature in terms of realism, but rare to treat diagrams, graphs, and maps that way. We are perfectly happy to say that diagrams are unhelpful, useful, misleading, and the like, but we don’t find “realism” an appropriate term to apply to them. This suggests that there is more to realism than merely appropriate informativeness.