Analytic philosophy of depiction: disciplinary and theoretical specifics

The aim of this article is to display the constitutive features of analytic philosophy of depiction (APD), a research field barely represented in Russian scientific literature. While sharing some core methodological implications and stylistic patterns with other subdivisions of analytic philosophy, APD tends to form rather enclosed philosophical community with its distinctive theoretical "canon" and highly specialized set of research questions. Philosophers of depiction explore the concept of picture rather than more conventional and broadly understood 'image'. From this perspective pictures are defined as two-dimensional objects simultaneously possessing some material vehicle (plane, surface) and some visual representational content. Philosophical understanding of pictures usually presupposes reflecting on problems of how pictorial representation works and in which respect it differs from other representational systems, of how ontological duality of depiction may be explained and of how to discern the conditions and singularities of pictorial experience and basic pictorial understanding. Some of these questions were initially posed by philosophers of art, but APD has already obtained theoretical independence from aesthetics at the current stage of its development. The core APD accounts include illusion theory (E.H. Gombrich), structural theories (N. Goodman, J. Kulvicki), seeing-in and twofold-ness theory (R. Wollheim), make-believe theory (K. Walton), recognitional theories (F. Schier, D.M. Lopes) and experienced resemblance theories (J. Hyman, R. Hopkins). It is shown that despite their radical discrepancies, they share core standards of argumentation along with tendency to provide "strong" but concise explanations of depiction-related problems as well as to introduce novel, unorthodox notions in order to make their conceptual apparatuses more specified, fine-grained and nuanced. The most original and somewhat idiosyncratic feature of APD is that it generally avoids preoccupations with historical, political or ideological implications of pictures and social conditions of their production, circulation and reception. Hence any further applications of APD's theoretical accomplishments have a strong need to be supported by comparisons with other directions of research concerning the pictorial and the visual (such as interdisciplinary image studies, visual studies, iconology etc.).

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