Pictorial Syntax: Two Proposals
Pradeep A. Dhillon
Professor in Educational Policy Studies
4PM, Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006
Lucy Ellis Lounge
Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1976) exerted great influence within the fields of philosophical aesthetics, art history, art criticism, and education. His committed anti-realist stance made him attractive to a generation of scholars who were beginning to come under the influence of post-structural theory. Not surprisingly, his proposal for a syntax of pictures, which was an important part of the book, was largely overlooked. This is beginning to change. In this paper I will lay out Goodman’s syntactic theory for pictures and Kulvicki’s refinement of it. I will raise three objections to Kulvicki’s proposal.