Dear Mike

 

I’m curious about how the conception/perception question actually arises and about whether you are looking for texts in psychology or philosophy that explain what is meant by the distinction so that you can go on to discuss it with your own examples or for texts that relate to art and visual communication. I’m not sure that the question about whether images can make statements is the same as the question about the distinction between conception and perception.

 

Anyway, Foucault’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe is fun to read and kind of related.

 

Mark Rollins has a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics on ‘Pictorial Representation’ which gives an overview of different approaches to perception and the interpretation of pictures. Probably also not quite what you want.

 

 

 

Helen

 

 

 

 

 

 

i hope i can make use of filmosophers’ expertise to help me with a tricky problem

 

i’m teaching a course on film adaptation and one of the many issues that such a course raises is what’s often referred to as the conception/perception question . . . in thinking about this one inevitably ends up wondering about the question of the nature of predication, which [for me, as a philosophical novice] is best illustrated by the question of whether  THE BLACK DOG and THE DOG IS BLACK are equivalent utterances – and the related question of whether an image [or movie] that can clearly show a black dog can also say [or predicate] that a dog IS black

 

i realize that cinema/moving images, and perhaps even single images, can be used to predicate, through the development of a language of images . . . but my question is whether or not a single image, an image showing a black dog, may be said to predicate blackness about the dog . . .  is short, can images make statements, can an image predicate or can it merely describe

 

now i’m not asking filmosophers for their thoughts about this complex question, which i believe has a long history . . . . rather i’m wondering if some of you can recommend materials [preferably short essays or book chapters] that deal with this question in ways that would be intelligible to beginning undergraduate students

 

any suggestions most welcome – in advance many thanks

 

mike