# kulvickiimages chapter 5 **Opening (not a real abstract):** Structural accounts of depiction are quite different than those we have already encountered. They are in some ways more ambitious and in some ways less ambitious than their competitors. On the one hand, they seek to understand all kinds of representation in terms of the same theory. Like the pretense theory, they are general theories of representation, and thus readily applied to the class of images, broadly speaking. To do this, they focus on rather abstract features of representations—their syntactic and semantic structure—which we will discuss at length below. On the other hand, because they focus on such abstract features, they can fail to account for all of the peculiarities that seem to make pictures, in particular, distinctive kinds of representation. The chief argument against structural