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Roman Frigg - Beyond mimesis and convention : representation in art and science

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Roman Frigg Beyond mimesis and convention : representation in art and science
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Representation is a concern crucial to the sciences and the arts alike. Scientists devote substantial time to devising and exploring representations of all kinds. From photographs and computer-generated images to diagrams, charts, and graphs; from scale models to abstract theories, representations are ubiquitous in, and central to, science. Likewise, after spending much of the twentieth century in proverbial exile as abstraction and Formalist aesthetics reigned supreme, representation has returned with a vengeance to contemporary visual art. Representational photography, video and ever-evolving forms of new media now figure prominently in the globalized art world, while this return of the real has re-energized problems of representation in the traditional media of painting and sculpture. If it ever really left, representation in the arts is certainly back.

Central as they are to science and art, these representational concerns have been perceived as different in kind and as objects of separate intellectual traditions. Scientific modeling and theorizing have been topics of heated debate in twentieth century philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, while representation of the real and ideal has never moved far from the core humanist concerns of historians of Western art. Yet, both of these traditions have recently arrived at a similar impasse. Thinking about representation has polarized into oppositions between mimesis and convention. Advocates of mimesis understand some notion of mimicry (or similarity, resemblance or imitation) as the core of representation: something represents something else if, and only if, the former mimics the latter in some relevant way. Such mimetic views stand in stark contrast to conventionalist accounts of representation, which see voluntary and arbitrary stipulation as the core of representation. Occasional exceptions only serve to prove the rule that mimesis and convention govern current thinking about representation in both analytic philosophy of science and studies of visual art.

This conjunction can hardly be dismissed as a matter of mere coincidence. In fact, researchers in philosophy of science and the history of art have increasingly found themselves trespassing into the domain of the other community, pilfering ideas and approaches to representation. Cognizant of the limitations of the accounts of representation available within the field, philosophers of science have begun to look outward toward the rich traditions of thinking about representation in the visual and literary arts. Simultaneously, scholars in art history and affiliated fields like visual studies have come to see images generated in scientific contexts as not merely interesting illustrations derived from high art, but as sophisticated visualization techniques that dynamically challenge our received conceptions of representation and aesthetics.

Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science is motivated by the conviction that we students of the sciences and arts are best served by confronting our mutual impasse and by recognizing the shared concerns that have necessitated our covert acts of kleptomania. Drawing leading contributors from the philosophy of science, the philosophy of literature, art history and visual studies, our volume takes its brief from our title. That is, these essays aim to put the evidence of science and of art to work in thinking about representation by offering third (or fourth, or fifth) ways beyond mimesis and convention. In so doing, our contributors explore a range of topics-fictionalism, exemplification, neuroaesthetics, approximate truth-that build upon and depart from ongoing conversations in philosophy of science and studies of visual art in ways that will be of interest to both interpretive communities. To put these contributions into context, the remainder of this introduction aims to survey how our communities have discretely arrived at a place wherein the perhaps-surprising collaboration between philosophy of science and art history has become not only salubrious, but a matter of necessity.

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Roman Frigg and Matthew Hunter (eds.) Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science Beyond Mimesis and Convention Representation in Art and Science 10.1007/978-90-481-3851-7_1 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Telling Instances
Catherine Z. Elgin 1
(1)
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Catherine Z. Elgin
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Abstract
Science, we are told, is (or at least aspires to be) a mirror of nature, while art imitates life. If so, both disciplines produce, or hope to produce, representations that reflect the way the mind-independent world is. Scientific representations are supposed to be complete, accurate, precise and distortion-free. Although artistic representations are granted more leeway, they too are supposed to resemble their subjects. Underlying these clichs is the widespread conviction that representations are intentional surrogates for, or replicas of, their objects. If so, a representation should resemble its referent.
Science, we are told, is (or at least aspires to be) a mirror of nature, while art imitates life. If so, both disciplines produce, or hope to produce, representations that reflect the way the mind-independent world is. Scientific representations are supposed to be complete, accurate, precise and distortion-free. Although artistic representations are granted more leeway, they too are supposed to resemble their subjects. Underlying these clichs is the widespread conviction that representations are intentional surrogates for, or replicas of, their objects. If so, a representation should resemble its referent.
This stereotype is false and misleading. It engenders unnecessary problems in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of art. It makes a mystery of the effectiveness of sketches, caricatures, scientific models, and representations with fictional subjects. Indeed, the stereotype strongly suggests that there is something intellectually suspect about such representations. Caricatures exaggerate and distort. Sketches simplify. Models may do all three. Many pictures and models flagrantly fail to match their referents. Representations with fictional subjects have no hope of matching, since they have no referents to match. The same subject, real or fictive, can be represented by multiple, seemingly incongruous representations. These would be embarrassing admissions if representations were supposed to accurately reflect the facts.
Mimetic accounts of representation fail to do justice to our representational practices. Many seemingly powerful and effective representations turn out on a mimetic account to be at best flawed, at worst unintelligible. Nor is it clear why we should want to replicate reality. As Virginia Woolf allegedly said, Art is not a copy of the real world. One of the damn things is enough! To replicate reality would simply be to reproduce the blooming buzzing confusion that confronts us. What is the value in that? Our goal should be to make sense of thingsto structure, synthesize, organize, and orient ourselves toward things in ways that serve our ends.
Nominalism is of no help with this task, for it is undiscriminating. According to nominalism, there are no natural kinds. Since, except for paradoxically self-referential cases, every collection of entities constitutes an extension, every two or more objects resemble each other in virtue of their joint membership in some extension. Thus mere resemblance cannot serve as a ground for representation, else everything would represent everything else. This is true but unhelpful. That there are no natural kinds tells us virtually nothing about how representations function.
The problem lies in the metaphor of the mirror and the ideal of replication. Neither art nor science is, can be, or ought to be, a mirror of nature. Rather, I will argue, effective representations in both disciplines embody and convey an understanding of their subjects. Since understanding is not mirroring, failures of mirroring need not be failures of understanding. Once we recognize the way science affords understanding, we see that the features that look like flaws under the mirroring account are actually virtues. A first step is to devise an account of scientific representations that shows how they figure in or contribute to understanding. It will turn out that an adequate account of scientific representation also affords insight into representation in the arts.
Representation
The term representation is irritatingly imprecise. Pictures represent their subjects; graphs represent the data; politicians represent their constituents; representative samples represent whatever they are samples of. We can begin to regiment by restricting attention to cases where representation is a matter of denotation. Pictures, equations, graphs, charts, and maps represent their subjects by denoting them. They are representations of the things that they denote., 2126). Thus, there are griffin-pictures even though there are no griffins to depict. There is an ideal-gas-description even though there is no ideal gas to describe. There are also mixed cases. The class of dog-representations includes both factual and fictional representations. Factual dog-representations are representations of dogs; fictional dog-representations lack denotata.
Denoting symbols with null denotation may seem problematic. Occasionally philosophers object that in the absence of griffins, there is no basis for classifying some pictures as griffin pictures and refusing to so classify others. Such an objection supposes that the only basis for classifying representations is by appeal to an antecedent classification of their referents. This is just false. We readily classify pictures as landscapes without any acquaintance with the real estateif anythat they represent. I suggest that each class of p -representations constitutes a small genre, a genre composed of all and only representations with a common ostensible subject matter. There is then a genre of griffin-representations and a genre of ideal-gas-representations. And we learn to classify representations as belonging to such genres as we study those representations and the fields of inquiry that devise and deploy them. This is no more mysterious than learning to recognize landscapes without comparing them to the terrain they ostensibly depict.
Some representations denote their ostensible objects. Others do not. Among those that do not, somesuch as caloric-representationssimply fail to denote. They purport to denote something, but there is no such thing. They are therefore defective. Others, such as ideal-gas-representations are fictive. They do not purport to denote any real object. So their failure to denote is no defect. We know perfectly well that there is no such animal as a griffin, no such person as Othello, no such gas as the ideal gas. Nonetheless, we can provide detailed representations as if of each of them, argue about their characteristics, be right or wrong about what we say respecting them and, I contend, advance understanding by means of them.
Representation As
x is, or is not, a representation of y depending on what x denotes. And x is, or is not, a z -representation depending on its genre. This enables us to form a more complex mode of representation in which x represents y as z . In such a representation, symbol x is a z -representation that as such denotes y . Caricature is a familiar case of representation-as. Winston Churchill is represented as a bulldog; George W. Bush is represented as a deer in the headlights. According to R. I. G. Hughes, representation-as is central to the way that models function in science (Hughes ). This excellent idea needs elaboration.
Representation-of can be achieved by fiat. We simply stipulate: let x represent y and x thereby becomes a representation of y . This is what we do in baptizing an individual or a kind. It is also what we do in ad hoc illustrations as, for example, when I say (with appropriate accompanying gestures), If that chair is Widener Library, and that desk is University Hall, then that window is Emerson Hall in helping someone to visualize the layout of Harvard Yard. We could take any p -representation and stipulate that it represents any object. We might, for example, point to a tree-picture and stipulate that it denotes the philosophy department. But our arbitrary stipulation does not bring it about that the tree-representation represents the philosophy department as a tree.
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