Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

What do images represent, and what are their expressive limitations? Recently, many philosophers have argued that images—both mental and external—cannot represent particular individuals, and instead only represent general kinds of things. After motivating and clarifying these arguments against imagistic representation of particulars, I will argue that they fail—they equivocate between different ways of individuating images and threaten to overgeneralize to non-imagistic representations.  Moreover, many of the considerations that have led theorists to deny that images represent particulars instead motivate a model of imagistic content that I call Indexical Particularism. The core idea is that imagistic representation of particulars is dependent on context and not just on the intrinsic properties of images alone.