The seminar on Public Representations has begun!
27 Octobre 2008
Roberto Casati (Institut Jean Nicod CNRS EHESS-ENS, Paris)
Pictograms, axonometries and indeterminacies of perspectival content
Abstract : I apply the distinction between factual and perspectival content to pictures. I discuss some informational indeterminacies and show that they do not threaten the validity of the notion of perspectival content of pictures; indeed, they can help reclassifying pictures, in a way that neatly excludes diagrams, on the one hand, and accommodates axonometries and pictograms on the other.
Keywords: pictures, diagrams, pictograms, axonometries, perspectival content, informational indeterminacies
Excerpt:
The distinction between factual and perspectival content can be put to work so as to accomplish a welcome demarcation in the domain of public representations. Indeed, the presence of a perspectival dimension is what distinguishes pictures such as photographs or drawings from most other kinds of graphic representation. Diagrams and data-displays typically lack perspectival content (or, if they have it, it is in the norm inessential to them, as an added decoration): by looking at them, the perceiver is not able to situate herself in space relative to the represented object. No matter what the exact articulation of ‘situate herself’ is favored here (for instance, a kind of imagining seeing), the issue is that by looking at a picture the viewer can retrieve a viewpoint from which the object was presumably seen. And this retrieval is not applicable to graphics and data displays.
Diagram Based Reasoning 